Halong Bay Hotels
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A Night in a Junk on Halong Bay
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More pics here
We booked an overnight trip to Halong Bay, one of the top 10 attractions in Vietnam and a UNESCO World Heritage site. We were surprised to discover that we were the only guests on our boat, the Bai Tu Long Junk. The boat can hold up to 16 passengers and normally our guide said that there are 10-14 people. So our Junk departed short with 2 passengers outnumbered by the 6 crew members, which was pretty funny. It was nice having the boat to ourselves - there was a lot of room for sure! Halong Bay had some awesome scenery, check out the pics. However what distracted from the experience was the sheer number of junks and other boats in the bay - it was a parking lot of junks. Also the experience seemed very commercialized overall as masses of people board hundreds of junks each day at the same time, tour around the same area of Halong Bay, and also drop anchor in the same area again for the night. There is an infrastructure in the bay to support the hundreds of tourist boats - there were docks where the crew could buy seafood for meals, docks to rent kayaks from, and many boats that patrolled the area to transport various supplies. The most interesting boat we saw was one made out of concrete that supplied fresh water to the junks. Other smaller rowboats circled the junks trying to sell goods to tourists. There was the lady that sold shells, or a snack lady that sold Oreos, Pringles, and bottles of wine. Seeing all this organized activity around us made it seem that we were watching TV, and a little detached from the experience.
Aside from the awesome scenery, couple other things we did like on the tour were the food and the kayak trip. The crew cooked us some fabulous seafood. The crabs were beautiful deep red in color with white speckles, and very sweet. The steamed shrimp and fish were also excellent. There was enough food to feed 3 times the amount of people! The kayak ride the next day was fun in that we got to explore the karst scenery. We went through a natural tunnel in one of the limestone mountains which led to a hidden bay. More thumbnails ...
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