Wonderful Ha Long Bay

Anthony and I caught the 6am train from Hanoi to Haiphong, which was actually my first train experience. It was comfortable, though not as “steady” feeling as I had expected. Once we arrived at the train station, we had 20 minutes to find a taxi, get taxi’d over to the harbor, buy hydrofoil tickets, and get on the hydrofoil. Fortunately, there were dozens of taxis clamoring for our business. The first one we chose, however, showed us over to his little scooter. We’ve been in Vietnam long enough to realize that the Vietnamese can fit as much as they damn well want on a scooter, but we weren’t so sure the two of us and our luggage wanted to go through that experience. So we found a car taxi instead and were on our way, getting onto the hydrofoil on time, and without getting scammed as I had been forewarned. Hurray!

We pulled up to Cat Ba Island, which is beautiful, though like most of Vietnam, it’s at this weird stage of rapid growth. Plenty of poverty around, but also a lot of hotels and restaurants and bars being built.

Our tour guide met us at the hydrofoil, and after some prep at the office and a drive down to the water, we were loaded up on our Junk. We had chosen to do a private tour along the bays (Lan Ha, Ha Long, and Bai Tu Long bays) with Cat Ba Ventures. I had read mixed reviews on Ha Long Bay due to it being overrun by tourists and filled with boats and litter, so I chose to do the tour out of Cat Ba Island rather than Halong City. I was super pleased with that decision.

It was a bit cloudy and foggy for the first part of the tour, but it was still obviously gorgeous. The karst mountains had a smoky look through the fog, and the water was just so calm and peaceful. There was an occasional other boat, but it never once felt overrun, and I also noticed hardly any litter.

We stopped at a floating fish farm which just completely boggles my mind. These fish farms were everywhere in Lan Ha Bay. The farmers build these little floating shacks right on the water, and they grow and catch fish there. Sometimes boats bring them food and such from the markets, or every now and then they’ll go back to the island for their shopping. But mostly, their days are just spent there. I can’t imagine being that immobile. And all of them had dogs living there too, and somehow the dogs looked happy enough.

After that brief visit, we were back on the Junk, enjoying our beautiful views and chatting with our tour guide.

We were served a delicious feast for lunch, just SO MUCH food. We’re not ones to waste food, so we somehow ate it all.

Eventually, we stopped to do some kayaking. The kayaking was amazing. We went through a long cave that came out to this beautiful, peaceful lagoon.

We then went through another cave to another lagoon. And then another.

Our guide was a kayaking machine, and so after all that, we kayaked some more to an empty beach to swim. It was a bit too chilly to swim, though, so then we kayaked all the way back to the junk.

We watched a beautiful, if somewhat foggy, sunset over the water while hanging out with our guide.

We then went down for yet another massive feast, this one even bigger to where we couldn’t finish it all. We drank a bottle of wine with it and then went off to bed, where we slept through the whole night for the first time since arriving in Vietnam. And by slept all the way through the night, I mean we slept til around 5:30.

I was feeling pretty miserable because of my cold, so I napped up on top a bit more until we were called down for breakfast and coffee.

Afterward, I tried to wake myself up by taking in some morning views.

I still felt lousy, but it was time for some kayaking, so I sucked it up and put my swimsuit on. Fortunately, the kayaking was so much fun, I completely forgot about how terrible I felt.

We first went through Bat Cave, which had a message above it telling us not to enter. It’s very dark in the cave, so it’s easy to get lost and hurt. It also goes under water at high tide. But lucky for us, we had a knowledgeable guide.

We did end up seeing a dozen bats while in bat cave, and then out we came out the other end of the cave to a calm lake. We sat there in silence, listening to the birds and cicadas. All of a sudden, we heard a new sound, and our guide sort of gasped “monkey!”. So we rowed over to the sound, but were never able to actually see the monkey, just hear him.

We gave up and went back through the cave and continued kayaking on, going through a few more caves to a few more lagoons.

We had everywhere all to ourselves, and it was magical. On our way back out, we saw the hordes of tourists with other companies heading our way, so getting out on the water early was the way to go. We stopped in one final lagoon, and once we got in there, Anthony pointed a ways away, and I looked over, and monkeys! A bunch of them, with babies! They were down on some rocks at the water, but by the time we got close enough for pictures, they had climbed up into the trees. But we sat there for awhile, watching them jump between trees, and eat.

We came back to the junk for long enough to cruise over to a little beach. We grabbed some snorkel gear, hopped into the water, and swam over to it. On the way, Anthony apparently ran into a jellyfish. Said jellyfish retaliated by stinging the crap out of his leg. Anthony thought “meh” and kept swimming over. We snorkeled and swam for around half an hour before swimming back to the boat. Upon arrival, we pointed out the bright red jellyfish stings on Anthony’s leg, and the boat crew quickly jumped into action to apply some natural remedy to it, giving him the “tough tourist” award because anyone else they had had get stung came back to the boat immediately. Anthony was pretty proud after that.