vietnam

As much as Rich and I don't like organized trips while traveling, we signed up for a Junk Boat trip on Ha Long bay. It is one of those "must dos" that most of the tourists to Vietnam take part in. We arrived at the cafe in Hanoi where the mini van would leave from, worrying about our fellow tour groupies - would we like them? Would they be lame? and immediately meet a lovely couple from Australia and thought, oh good, people we get along with. All of us were thrilled...up until the point we got put into different vans because they were doing two nights on a boat and we were one night on a boat and one in a hotel. Oh well. It was a brief, very brief friendship.

The dock at Ha Long City is littered with boats. The boats are double and quadruple parked. In order to get onto our boat we had climb across three other boats.



At this point I'm wondering what type of tourist hell we've agreed to for two nights and three days, but the reality was quite nice. Although there were dozens and dozens of boats, once we headed out into the bay, with its thousand or so islands, and the boats thinned out, the magic of Ha Long Bay appeared.



We spent one day kayaking which is a great way to really appreciate the enormity of the rocks jutting up out of the water. The water is clear and cool and there are lagoons totally enclosed by the rocks except at low tide when you can kayak through to the inner lagoon.



After lunch on the kayaking day we paddled to the floating village.





The village has 1,000 people and probably 3,000 dogs and a few pissed off cats. On the plus side of being a cat on a floating village - lots of fish. The negatives? Surrounded by water and dogs.



The village used to have over 20,000 people, but they lived a subsistence life, catching fish and burning wood from the islands. The government realized that the area was being damaged by the way of life and switched people to an aqua culture life. Now, the villagers farm dogfish and grouper in pens created from plastic drums lashed together with 3x4s. The dogs run along the boards like teenage gymnasts on the balance beam, and skitter to a stop at the edge to bark ferociously at the kayaks. We were waiting for a dog to jump in and swim after us, or to leap on the kayak but none did. I was in the rear of our double kayak and had control of the rudder so I kept us about six feet from the dogs, figuring they couldn't jump that far.

What started out seeming to be a group tourist trip from hell ended up being very nice.



There are more photos on the flickr site, just click on one of the photos to go the whole set on line.