Feb. 23 Ha Long Bay

We arrived in Ha Long Bay this morning. Unfortunately, it is foggy, but we can still see the rock formations which leap straight out of the water. There are many of these rock formations about 1969 and 900 are large enough they have been named. The islands are named for their shape or history. Some of the islands are inhabited.

To complicate matters in the fog there are many large cargo ships and small fishing vessels. The large ships often have a series of smaller cargo ships lined up beside them for loading and unloading as they cannot get into the dock. We are actually 75 miles from Hanoi here.

Ha Long is the busiest port in the north. Mountainous area and major coal mining area. The local city is divided by the river and connected by a bridge and ferries. We took a bus to Bay Chay Beach. There are several large new hotels.  This is becoming a major tourist area with lots of foreign investment. A house in this area would cost about one million US dollars. It sounds like there is a lot of Taiwan and Japanese money being invested here. Lots of high end  hotels being built. It looks like they are preserving that water front. There are restaurants , the night market and walkways along the waterfront, the hotels are being built across the road from the water on hills, so good views.

Most boats we have been on use the “Oakville”  docking method. Some of you will remember this as aiming the front of the boat at the dock and hitting the dock with your bow. Luckily these boats are built for this with a square front the passengers can walk off and no pieces of fiberglass fly off!

The bay is amazing. Despite it being a foggy day we see the islands rise out of the water all around us. It is a very active bay with many boats – tourist boats, fishing boats, large ocean going cargo ships, fish farms, boats selling produce. We had a stop to visit the grotto. The grotto is basically a hugh cave. The cave was discovered in 1995 and opened to visitors in 1998. Of course there is a legend about this as well. The dragon prince fell in love with a lady from the sea. The cave was the location of the wedding. Wedding guests included all the animals and the cave was decorated with many flowers. If you used your imagination you could see some of the animals in rock formations. The dragon prince and his wife had 100 children who are the ancestors of the Vietnamese people.

90% of the islands are limestone, formed by a process called Tectonic Mark Down (I think Ross will need to research that one for us). The bay survived the war as the Americans made a conscious decision to not bomb the bay. They had mined it and came in when the war ended and removed all their mines themselves.

See some interesting ways of doing things. We passed 2 young men on a motorbike. The one riding was sitting on the bike facing backwards and pulling a wheelbarrow with a green garbage bag in it. They pulled up to the side of the road where there was a pile of garbage and without stopping he tipped the garbage bag out, they did a U turn and went back the way they came with him now pulling the empty wheelbarrow. All the people row boats backwards from the way we do it. Usually standing, they face the way they are going and push with the oar rather than pull.

As our boat goes slowly through the fish farm areas several small boats pull along side trying to sell fruit. Each boat has a man driving, a woman on top of the boat with many bowls of fruit and one or two young children aged about 3 – 5. The woman climbs on our boat to sell the fruit and the kids sit on the top of their boat look cute and wave.