Ha Long literally means “where the dragon descends into the sea”. Legend has it that a dragon used to live in the mountains and as it flew towards the coast line, its tail would plunge into the land and create vast crevasses and gouge out the land. As water filled the vast holes, all that was left was the bay and the giant limestone cliffs jetting out from what is now the Gulf of Tonkin. Halong Bay is beautiful, and sharing it with some new great friends made it even more memorable. Our new friends Francisco and Johanna from Switzerland and Paul and Emily from England joined us for the 3 days and 2 nights we spent out on Halong Bay on an overnight boat cruising tour of the bay and nearby Cat Ba island as well. The only way you can really experience this is via a boat tour and a guide. Halong Bay is approximately 3 hours from Hanoi and requires a short mini-bus trip to get to the massive docks. Some 300 sleeping boats call this area home and run tours daily. It’s a massive tourist attraction to say the least, boats boats boats everywhere at the docks. Our boat was a nice big triple decker with sleeping cabins, restaurant and bar, and a sun deck on top. Our sleeping cabins were very nice, with private bath, and even with hot water showers.
Over 3000 islands rise up from the emerald waters in this area and it is renowned for its spectacular views which we can easily understand now. It is being voted this year to potentially become one of the 7 wonders of the natural world. I’d say if it doesn’t end up being one, it’s gotta be high on the list still. It’s quite impressive and a must see if you visit Hanoi and the north of Vietnam.
We were lucky and got pretty good weather: 1 day with sun and clear skies and clear evenings and then just an OK weather day the 2nd with some mist and clouds and a little more gray. We did some exploring on T-Top island to get the highest view around. From T-Top we could view “turtle island” from so high up, although we thought turtle island looked a bit more like a “plucked chicken island” :)
The pictures say it all and the slideshow will really help show what we experienced.(coming next) But possibly some of our best moments were just with our good friends, enjoying their company, swapping stories, eating, riding bikes, having several beers and last but not least- Karaoke late at night on the boat. Having good company on the boat really made this trip the tops. We may post a Karaoke video or two, although we are all quite the amateurs and mostly it was just some great goofy beer drinking fun. “Mr. Duc” our tour guide even got in on the action, he’s quite the singing buff.
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