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April 21, 2005
Vietnam | Halong Bay & Cat Ba Island | 13-14 March 2005
Halong Bay is one of those internationally well-known sites that everyone MUST see on a journey through northern Vietnam and I was no exception. Unfortunately, I was there at the wrong time of year, with loads of fog and mist around to block much of the distant views, quite different from most of the postcard pictures. I had been told by some other travellers that when they went the week before, they couldn’t see A THING! Fortunately it wasn’t as bad as that for me, distant formations visible, but not especially clear and the mist clearing around the formations once we got within a few hundred metres.
After getting to Halong Boat Station (3-4 hours by bus), we had an organised group lunch at a local Chinese restaurant.
I met the four other people who were doing the same 2 day, 1 night trip that I was taking – a Dutchman and an Italian, both on holiday from their Japanese University studies as well as a Vietnamese couple apparently on their honeymoon. I say ‘apparently’ because it is a well-known trick for young couples to say they are on a honeymoon, or recently married, so that hoteliers and police don’t hassle them about staying in the same room together.
We were put on a ‘standard boat cruise’, simply purchased from a ticketing window (if you decide to DIY) at the entrance to the jetty system, so we were effectively herded onto a boat with a bunch of other tourists from various other tour groups. Fortunately it wasn’t too crowded, there were seats for all.
The first thing we realised was that we were glad we weren’t doing any snorkelling or kayaking, as it was COLD! Clearly another reason why we were there in the wrong season. The second thing we realised was just how many (mostly tourist) boats there were in the bay. Literally hundreds of them, going every which way, all over the place… It was astounding!
Hang Dau Go, the most popular tourist cave, was the first stop. I don’t remember ever seeing such touristed caves that are actually real caves. The caves themselves were reasonably impressive, notwithstanding the NEON lights of various colours that were lighting up the massive structures and coming out of random mini-caves… I did feel that the penguin-garbage-bins were possibly slightly out of place however. This cave is definitely a mass-tourist cave, the small bay filled with tourist boats coming, going and waiting for their payload, the caves also offering multi-linguistic tour-guides (at a price).
In the same bay, some of us also visited the second set of caves – Hang Thien Cung, which was similar but less visited, less made-up and more spacious.
The next destination was within a cluster of islands, a typical tourist stop, as we saw a turnover of about 3 boats in our 1 hour stay there. The boat anchored next to some others and we were offered (for an extra fee, of course!) a mini-boat tour of one of the local Coves ‘inside’ one of the islands. It was pretty impressive – we went in this little boat through a cave-like entrance into the middle of the island.
While moored, many fruit-sellers offered their wares from little row-boats – as you can see below, some of the sellers are surprisingly quite fashion-conscious!
The rest of the afternoon we spent inside the boat (it was too cold to sit outside) while it slowly made its way to Cat Ba town, on the opposite side of Cat Ba Island.
The five of us, plus a new tour guide took us to our hotel, where we were piled into two rooms. We went for a quick (but horrible) coffee on the waterfront before going back to the hotel for a similar dinner to our lunch. We drank some wine with the ‘newlyweds’, before going out for more drinks at ‘the local bar’. After happy hour had finished, we went to the nightclub that we passed on the way to the bar. It was quite large, and in peak season could hold quite a number of people. In low season it could hold just as many people, just that there weren’t that many people there… Including our group, there were a maximum of 13 people there during out stay. The music was good, the venue quite good, but the atmosphere was somewhat lacking. We then decided to check out the Seaview Bar, on the 8th floor of a hotel, which we had read about in the Lonely Planet, and had noticed on our way to coffee – unfortunately it was closed by the time we got there.
That was pretty much it for the night, and although not a lot was happening, our little group had fun.
The following day’s journey back to the mainland was pretty similar to the trip to Cat Bat. Cold, a little sleep and uncomfortable, and long.
I really enjoyed the trip - Halong Bay is a definite must-see and would be fantastic in a warmer season.
Posted by Dan at April 21, 2005 06:17 AM