Halong Bay

We just got back from a 2 day trip to Halong Bay and I think it’s safe to say that it was a great success.

The trip started off a bit rough - Grady had developed a skin rash before leaving and Emma May got car sick and vomited on the two of us about 1/2 way through the 4 hour drive. The good news is that Grady is one tough bugger when it comes to dealing with problems and Emma May felt a lot better after we had a stop.

Ha Long Bay itself was a mystical looking place with a visual blend of mist, small limestone islets/karsts and floating fishing villages. We spent 24 hours on a replica Chinese Junk called the Red Dragon, operated by the Indochina Junk JSK. The boat was realy cool and the staff and food (locally caught seafood) were great.

Our first day on the boat was met with rain, wind and cool temperatures. Ha Long and Hanoi were both around 14C, which was really surprising given that temps were around 32C the day before. One nice thing about this was that the air and visibility was excellent. Apparently the area is usually quite misty. We got the chance to kayak, swim an explore some caves, which was really neat to do in such a setting.

The kIds woke up at 4:45am the next day, still suffering from jet lag. The weather was back to it’s usual misty best and the junk explored some more of the islets. We made our way to a fishing village where we took bamboo row boats for a tour around the floating village and surrounding area. I really enjoyed it, other than stopping at the set-up-for-tourists-shopping-stand. I really hate visiting contrived tourist attractions. Oh well, the people were friendly and not pushy.

Our trip ended around noon and we took a shuttle bus back to Hanoi. We’re now hanging out at the Golden Sun 2 for a couple of hours before we go to the train station for an overnight train to Hue. Another adventure awaits us and the kids are looking forward to it!