Daddy overseeing our arrival into Ha Long Bay
So we left Shanghai, spent a couple of days at sea, and
arrived into Ha Long Bay, Vietnam under a blanket of fog. The fog was bad not bad enough to keep an
august group of Vietnamese immigration officials from joining our little boat
party, must be the war canoe was in the shop cause these guys had to get to us
by junk – not a bad gig if you can swing it, especially when the three that
were stuck on the boat all day got to have dinner with us later on in the
evening, more on that in a sec.
Ha Long is one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. The limestone rock outcroppings are
spectacular, seemingly defying gravity and threatening to topple at a moment’s
shake. Luckily Mommy and Daddy had seen
bunches of them with Amy and Ron in Pukhet (Thailand), and I was able to live
vicariously through their pictures. I
had scheduled a kayak tour of the rocks, but was sure that because of the fog it
would be cancelled. Nope! I
gathered my courage and left the big boat with a few other hearty souls. We traveled for about 40 minutes by local
‘junk’ to the site from which the kayaks launch.
On the way we saw some local color, and got a whiff of what
life on the water can be. I don’t that I
would describe it as smelling like victory, or much else for that matter, but
take a look and you tell me what you
think it smelled like!
To say the infrastructure for the kayaking expedition is
tenuous would be generous. We arrived at
what amounts to a flotilla of floating barges, apparently each with a separate
purpose. Some were fisheries, some were
homes, one floating structure was even a school!
The girls in this picture came up alongside the barge where we got our kayaks and were selling fruit, as soon as we stopped showing any interest in them, they moved on to another mark.
The kayaking was interesting, and tiring. Since there was no sun it was probably not as striking as it might have been. There is so much fishing there did not seem to be much marine life at all – although I saw huge jelly fish! All the same we say the dog rock, heard lots of birds, and worked hard to avoid being in the traffic lane for large oncoming party boats – college aged students, loud music, and attitudes included!
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