Of my five days in Vietnam, I spent most of them in Ha Long Bay an area in northern Vietnam on a Junk. Getting there was an ordeal, a two hour flight to Ha Noi followed by a three hour drive to the bay. We stayed out all night before going to the bay, needless to say it was neither my most pleasant flight nor my most pleasant drive. Once we arrived, it was truly blissful.
The Junk we stayed on was a beautiful wooden boat with accommodations for 14 plus crew. On the ship were six SaS students (my group), a family from Australia, and two couples from the US. The ship was plenty large for all of us, and no one seemed upset at being stuck on a ship with six college students.
The first order of business was lunch. We ate like kings. A multi-course seafood bonanza was brought to the table. Fish, shrimp, crab! Alden, you would have loved this the first course was six steamed crabs. Two people in our group didn't eat seafood, and they made accommodations for them. The service was truly amazing. All the meals we were served were similarly fantastic.
After lunch we traveled out into the bay. Neither pictures nor words and adequately describe this place. Imagine thousands of small stone spire like islands springing up everywhere. Each island is about ½ a kilometer in diameter and an entire 360 degrees of your vision is taken up by them. Some larger some smaller of course. We stopped a a larger island with a cave formation in it first. Growing up in Colorado, I've seen some of the most incredible cave systems in the world, these caves were a rival of any of the ones I've seen. Afterwards we went to a beach to swim until dinner time.
When we got back to the Junk, I needed a nap before dinner and crawled into bed to take one. Our tour guide had explained earlier in the day that if we wanted to bring beer or alcohol onto the ship it would cost 10,000 dong per beer and 100,000 dong per bottle of liqueur or wine. Everyone assumed that we would be going to a village or something to purchase the alcohol, yet how wrong we were. When I woke from my nap I opened my cabin door. Lo and behold a woman in a row boat had pulled up next to the ship and was calling “cold beer”, “good price, cheap”, and “you buy, you buy” with her accent it sounds much more like “coal bia”, “goo pice” and “ou bi, ou bi”. I can't really describe it without saying it. I was taken aback to say the least. Anyway, dinner was equally delicious that night, and we made a fairly early bed considering our collective sleep deprivation from our all nighter beforehand.
The next morning we boated to a floating fishing village. The entire village was literally made of boats and rafts tied together. The community probably consisted of a few hundred people at most. We stopped at a school for the children of the village sponsored by Norway (yes the country), where we briefly played with the kids. Our guide informed us that most of the children could swim before they could walk; I'm not surprised – I was on skis at two after all.
Later that afternoon we went swimming and kayaking in the bay. We jumped off the top of the Junk into the water, which was a grand time. Afterwards I went on the most serene and peaceful kayaking experience of my life. Completely isolated from everyone except for our small group, we kayaked through several small islands and into a bay. The water was serene and peaceful, it was amazingly quiet, and perfectly gorgeous. My partner did manage to drop her paddle into the water (it didn't float), but that was the only disturbance of the trip (rather amusing and enjoyable, we dived the 10 meters down to the bottom to search for it entirely unsuccessfully). Back at the ship that night we relaxed, enjoyed the sunset (better than Michigan believe it or not, yes Dad it actually was), and relaxed for the remainder of the night.
The next day we had to get up early and get back to Ho Chi Minh city to be back on the boat at 9 pm.
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