Halong Bay
Trip Start
Jul 15, 2007
1
126
195
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
Halong Bay,
Vietnam
Monday, March 3, 2008
Since 1994, Halong Bay has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a designation given to a limited number of scenic, historic or architectural sites of special significance. The bay is a waterscape of blue-green sea and rock, the latter being the distinctive shapes of weathered karst formations. We spent the last two nights and three days on board a private houseboat, shaped like an old Chinese junk, cruising through the islands, stopping to kayak during the afternoons and anchor at night.
Karst is a kind of porous limestone, a sedimentary rock raised above the surface by tectonic activity, then weathered into a variety of startling shapes. Much of the time a mist hangs over the water, through which you see the pale grey shapes of the karst formations, overlapping silhouettes vanishing into the distance
Lunch on the Lagoon Explorer
.Our vessel was the Lagoon Explorer, which has four passenger cabins and a crew of five. Our new guide is Canh, taking over for Lam who is at the hospital waiting for news about his brother.
The first afternoon we anchored near a floating village to go kayaking. This was a new activity for all of us, and everyone but Katharine was reluctant for one reason or another. Alec thought he might be eaten by a shark. Jack thought the kayak would capsize and dump him into the water, and I feared that my spectacular lack of lower-body flexibility might make it impossible for me to get into the kayak, or perhaps to get out after a few hours of vigorous paddling.
None of us need have worried. The kayaks proved quite stable and we saw no aquatic creatures larger than a jellyfish. To my surprise I was able to squeeze into the cockpit, legs straight in front, trunk reclining at an extreme oblique angle, looking like the half-submerged rider of an extremely-chopped Harley.
Our two-hour paddle was a delight
Junks at harbor
. We headed away from the boat and around one of the karst islets, past several cultured-pearl farms. The only sounds were the splash of our paddles, occasional barking from a guard dog on one of the floating houses, and sometimes the faraway putt-putt of a two-stroke motor on a small fishing boat. The seascape was amazing: green-blue water, grey-white rock covered by green vines, multi-colored pastel floating houses. Unfortunately, both of our cameras were out of battery power, due to the kids' habit of taking three-minute movies of their Webkinz animals starring in various unlikely epics. So I am really sorry to have no picture of the eroded archway under a two-hundred foot cliff, with sunshine and the ocean visible on the other side and the water beneath lit up with an unearthly beauty.
As an alternative, I can offer you a brief video starring Puggish the stuffed dog as Harry Potter in the Sorcerer's Stone. Soon to come: David Beckham (a Webkinz beagle) and Allesandro (a sewn-silk elephant from Thailand) in Cyrano de Bergerac versus Mothra the Smog Monster.
You don't really want to see it. Trust me on this.
Sunset on Halong Bay
On the other hand, we highly recommend Halong Bay, for the winning combination of stunning scenery, vigorous exercise, and delicious Vietnamese food. One of the highlights of our trip to date.
We kayaked again on the second day. It turned out to be the time of the new moon, which coincides with the lowest tides of the month. Despite having only a three-inch draft, at several places we had to get out of the kayaks and pull them across an ocean bottom temporarily exposed by the receding tide. Katharine and Amy collided with a dead dog floating in the water, to the former's great dismay.
This morning we stopped at a famous cave, once home to the fearsome pirates of the Halong Bay. Spectacular cave formations run hundreds of feet through the limestone matrix of a good-sized karst island. We saw some interesting underground scenery, though nothing to rival Luray Caverns near Charlottesville, Virginia. (At least, not as I remember it about forty years later.) We learned that Jack has a nice broad streak of claustrophobia, the contra-positive of my agoraphobia perhaps. He was not happy inside the caves.
After the caves, we got back on the boat and returned to Halong. Now we are in the van for the three hour trip back to Hanoi, looking forward to high-speed internet at the Zephyr Hotel, an Italian dinner (the kids' choice tonight), and a nice long sleep.
