Off to Halong Bay

Tonight, our last night in Hanoi, we had our welcome dinner. The group consists of me and 4 families all with older or adult children, except one-know-it-all 8th grader. All of them have toured with this company before and many of them have just worked through the entire menu of options and have a tradition to do these trips for Christmas. They are from Toronto, Chicago, Dallas and Philadelphia, and they compared and contrasted all of their trips and lamented that they were running out of options.

My bicycle rickshaw incident has earned me special attention from the QC monitor as they've decided that this may have been my fault - major sigh. For dinner, I had crab soup, assorted spring rolls, red river fish with glass noodles and an interesting creme brûlée made with green rice. It was very good a combination of rice pudding and creme brûlée; it was rich with ginger.  

I sat next to one of the college students who had just finished a semester abroad in Tanzania. She was very interesting and poised and made me laugh until I cried over the creme brûlée, which we could just not wrap our mind around. During dinner, we were serenaded with Christmas carols, sung in English, Vietnamese, and French; they were good.

After a fairly good night's sleep, it was time to pack up and get on a bus to Halong Bay. They said it would take 3 to 3.5 hours because you can't drive faster than 40 miles per hour. It seemed to take quite a bit longer; there were two accidents on the road; one was pretty nasty. 30 people die in road accidents every day in Vietnam; I am actually surprised it is not more.

We stopped mid-way for a 5 star happy room (toilet). There were all kinds of handicrafts, jewelry, clothing, painting...there was also a large group of young girl embroidering away. They did not seem unhappy, but there was no chat and they were quite intent, as we were leaving I realized they did not use the 5 star bathrooms and instead used ones that were outside, and I assume not quite 5 star.

The road was not much of a road and was completely dirt in some places. They are widening it because it it the only way to get to Halong Bay over land, and the Bay has 5000 to 7000 visitors every day. Once we arrived, we were taken to a jetty boat and out to the Halong Jasmine - our home for the night. There were other people on the boat, but our group took up about half. After a tasty lunch of spring rolls, grapefruit chicken salad, banana blossom salad, noodles, fried fish and marinated squid, we all went and found a spot to watch the bay. It is amazingly gorgeous and sort of defies description - many pictures were taken.

Late afternoon, we got back on the jetty and were taken to a floating fishing village called Cau 

Gen. Once there, we got into row boats and were taken around, the 'buildings' eerily floating on styrofoam and blue barrels. Some were just a single building, some had out buildings, many had TVs that were powered by a generator.  While we were there, the water boat came along and filled up barrels and the grocer was doing her rounds selling everything from pampers to Pringles to melons.

There was a school that has 92 students, ages 6 to 12; the community has only had 1 girl go on the further education. The government is forcing them to all move inland in the name of protecting the environment. I get it because there was lots of rubbish and I have to believe all effluent goes into the sea and the area is a UNESCO site, but it's a complete loss of a way of life and that doesn't seem right either.

Dinner was in cave called Tien Ong. I can't imagine the time and effort it had taken to set this up, but they had gone to a very big effort. It was all Christmas themed and there was live music and dancers. Dinner was buffet and I had green papaya salad, noodles, and barbecue seafood - fish, octopus and prawns. The prawns and octopus were unbelievable. I also had some pork ribs and after watched everyone daintily eat theirs, I just picked them up and went after it.

I headed back early with a dream of a long nights sleep but between the partying Canadians and dropping and pulling the anchor, I didn't get much sleep, it was a very nice Christmas Eve. I did not miss the oyster stew, but a tamale might have been nice.