Our host made a bunch of announcements from the front of the dining room with a microphone. He started off by mentioning that it was a very special day today because "50 years ago today..." and Shelagh realized that he was announcing that it was her birthday, which he noticed after taking our passports. So after embarrassing her and getting people to sing happy birthday they started serving lunch. They asked if anyone didn't eat meat and Lisa and I were the only ones to raise our hands. After being asked about four times if we ate fish and answering no all four times they finally got that were were vegetarians.
The food was fantastic and plenty of it. There must have been nine courses. While Pete and Shelagh were eating calamari and cracking crab legs we were digging in to freshly roasted peanuts and french-fried potatoes. We got a feast every time we ate and the only thing not included in the tour price was the drinks. But those were only a buck each, both beer and sodas. That's the great thing about international travel in a lot of places, my beer doesn't cost any more than my wife's Diet Cokes.
After lunch they gave us the keys to our cabins and everyone went and threw their bags in the rooms. After settling in I grabbed another beer and we headed to the top deck. The Halong Phoenix got underway and we headed into the thick of Halong Bay. The ride was a jaw-dropping experience the whole way. The only way I've been able to describe it to people after I got back to the States was to say that it was like awe-inspiring nature of the Grand Canyon, multiplied by about a hundred.
Pictures don't even come close to doing justice to the size of the area and the incredible number of limestone islands rising out of the water, but we'll give it a shot.
(these look great if you click on them for the bigger image)
After cruising for a while we came to a small harbor where a bunch of other Chinese junks like ours and other types of tour boats were gathered. We climbed back aboard the transport boat and docked at one of the larger islands. We climbed what seemed to be about a thousand steps to get to the entrance of Hang Sung Sot, one of the largest known caves in Halong Bay. We were guided through three massive chambers of the cave, which was really difficult to capture in a wide photo due to the low light. So all we really have from the cave is one of me in probably my dorkiest picture (non-drunk category) ever.
And another of Lisa with one of the trash cans in the cave, which were so cute that she wanted to take one home.
When we came out the exit to the cave we were really high up on the island and we got a great panoramic view of the whole harbor below us with all the tour boats.
Then we made our way down another thousand or so stairs and ended up on the dock. We loaded on our transport boat and made a quick run over to another dock where those of us that wanted to go kayaking got off. The others went back to the Phoenix. Our guide stayed with us to lead our kayaking trip.
Just like everywhere else in Vietnam, there were people in Halong Bay trying to eke out a living off of selling stuff to tourists, like this snack boat.
If you look in the background of the picture above you'll see our table mates Pete and Shelagh, which turned out to be our only picture of them because just like all the other times we met cool people we never thought to get a picture with them.
We climbed on kayaks and followed our guide, getting a nice closer look at the limestone formations as well as making feeble attempts to get a picture of one of the low-flying hawks overhead.
We then came to a tunnel opening in one of the islands.
On the other side was this fantastic, quiet and peaceful cove. The only way in was through that tunnel so we were finally away from all of the large tour boats and their wakes.
The sun was setting on the way back and I was able to get a couple of shots.
When we got back to the Phoenix there were more passengers than there had been before. There was a group of tourists that were on a multi-day kayaking trip who had been staying on board already by the time we arrived and they were now done with their day of paddling around.
We hung out on the top deck again for a while before dinner and Lisa started talking to this German guy who was traveling by himself. His name was Niko and he was from Munich. Whenever we travel Lisa seems to get a chance to use her German. When dinnertime rolled around we invited Niko to our table.
We had another feast for dinner and our guide announced that there would be Karaoke in the dining room later. We made our way to the deck again.
We spent the rest of the night up on the deck talking to Niko, Pete, Shelagh and eventually the tour guide who was leading the kayaking group. Khoa was a really interesting cat, he had a fantastic grasp of English and he was really smart. When we talked about the U.S. he would just start throwing out a bunch of facts he knew about whichever place you were talking about. When I mentioned I lived in Seattle he knew what state that was in and the capital. Any time a U.S. city got mentioned he could name the state. During conversations about Australia he started naming the different kinds of plants and animals there were there, and I'm not talking about the simple ones like kangaroos and koalas.
We also got to pick his brain about Vietnam and life there. I won't go into too much of what we talked about right now, as I plan to do my thoughts about Vietnam when I finally wrap-up this travelogue epic.
We could hear some singing coming from off in the distance from one or more of the seemingly hundreds of tour boats anchored in the general vicinity of ours. Luckily, no one on our boat was interested so our karaoke machine never got used.
After a great night of conversation and drinks we hit the sack.
Next - Morning in Halong and then back to Hanoi
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