Halong Bay: Bay of a thousand islands.

At this point in our journey, we were beginning to feel a bit tired and travelled out.  The idea of an organized day tour where all your transportation and food was taken care of sounded awfully appealing.  So we signed up for a tour of Halong Bay through APT Travel.

After a four hour ride on a minibus, we arrived at the Halong Bay pier.  The Nu’u Nghi boat was waiting for us, and minutes upon setting sail, we were presented with a beautiful seafood feast.

The perfectly timed meal ended when we pulled up to the Don Thien Cung caves, and got off the boat to explore them for about a half hour.

(The coloured lights are just for effect.  The inside of the cave is not actually rainbow.)

Next stop was a fishing village, where a small group of Vietnamese people live year-round.  There is even a school here on the water, where children attend until age 11.  After that, students leave the village to continue school on the mainland.  We were given the chance to kayak in and around the fishing village and surrounding cliffs.

It was crazy to fathom the unique challenges of living in a small fishing community such as this one.  We wondered how they felt about their existence being a tourist attraction.

As you can see, Halong Bay is a pretty stunning place.  Although impossible to capture in one photo (unless from the air), Halong Bay is comprised of 1900-2000 islets.  It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Limestone cliffs, partially covered with lush plantlife, jet starkly around of the water.  Though pictures do not do justice to the immense awe that this place conjures, perhaps they convey more than words.  We’ll leave you now with a few images to take in.

It felt kind of weird to be the tourists in the tour group, but hey, after several weeks of organizing our own adventures, it was actually kind of nice to sit back and enjoy an excursion that someone had already done the work of orchestrating for us.

We got to know Halong Bay better than we were planning to.  Left behind again by our transport, after the agent PROMISED we would not be forgotten, we got to spend a bit of extra time hanging out in Halong Bay.  (But of all the places to be stranded… we suppose it could have been much worse.)

The town itself didn’t have a lot to offer, but we spent some extra time chilling out by the water.

The beach is where Halong Bayers seem to flock to in the evenings.  And why not?  It’s beauty is hard to ignore.  Young and old alike go for a dip to escape the heat.

It appeared that some organized swimming lessons were going on.  This was definitely the busiest beach we encountered throughout our time in SE Asia.

We highly recommend you visit the world wonder of Halong Bay if you ever get the chance!  (We heard the overnight cruises, or the ones that overnight on Cat Ba Island are pretty epic, but weren’t able to make it work.)

Thanks, Halong Bay, for sharing your splendor and beauty with us!

 

Hanoi: A place to sit and watch the world go by.

I hit a low point in our travels once we reached Hanoi, which we travelled to by rail.

After being dropped at the wrong location by our taxi driver, finding our hotel was obstacle number one in Vietnam’s capital.

Traffic was insane. Imagine, literally, a river of scooters flowing through the streets.

Crossing the street was at your own risk, and definitely a risk at that!  You just kind of had to go for it… slowly.  The general principle is that the traffic will go around you.  We are proud to say that we managed to avoid being hit by a scooter through the entire duration of our stay in Vietnam.

Appealing restaurants were a little harder to come by in Hanoi, as were people who spoke good English.

Northern Vietnam appeared less tourist-friendly than their neighbours in the South.

The smells, the chaos, the noise, the dirt, the cluttered sidewalks, the persistent nagging of street vendors… they were starting to get to me… one could say I was nearly “Asia’d out.”

THANKFULLY, I stumbled upon this article by Steve Jackson, who offered some wise & timely words:

“THERE IS NOT ONE SPECIFIC THING WORTH SEEING IN HANOI.

NOT ONE.

And yet Hanoi itself is unmissable.

Spend your time rushing around to see any of the sites on the above list and you may miss its charms.”

We thought Steve’s words to be very knowing, so we took his advice and did a little research on the Hanoi cafe scene.

After strolling around Hoi Kim Lake, we caught a cyclo who pedalled us to the doorstep of Cong Caphe.

On the walls inside this reputable Hanoi Cafe hang Vietnam war paraphernalia.

On the menu, a variety of coffee beverages, and a limited number of snack items, including pop corn.

Highly recommend the coffee and coconut coffee shake. An interesting flavor combination, but it works! Brendon says his best Vietnamese coffee experience was here as well.

Although the view was somewhat limited, the cafe itself was a great place to sit and think about Hanoi.

Beware that within the small cafe, smoking is permitted, so air quality has the potential to be quite poor. You’ll have to forgive Cong Caphe for the lung damage.

Thanks to Steve Jackson, we adapted a much more relaxed perspective about our time in Hanoi, which challenged me to focus less on ticking things off a list, and instead, look around and appreciate who and what was around me at that moment.