"The Descending Dragon"

According to old tales here in Vietnam, the Gods wanted to protect what later would become Vietnam against the Chinese forces. The story goes that the Gods sent a family of dragons to earth, and they all descended by what today is Ha Long Bay. They created a huge wall, preventing the attacking forces from harming the peoples of Vietnam. The dragons decided to live on earth, and when they left Ha Long Bay, the water rose and formed the topography that can be seen there today.

Ha Long is translated into "The Descending Dragon", and it is about 4 hours from Hanoi. All tourists who visit Vietnam go there, and this is of course something that the locals have taken advantages of. In nearly every restaurant and Café in Hanoi, they also have a counter working as a traveling agent, offering tours to Ha Long Bay. I usually do not like to go on the organized trips, but this time I was a little tired, and figured I would just sign up for a trip through my hostel.

The bus picked us up in the morning, and as I got on it, I found the five Americans from the train to Hanoi. We were six from my hostel, and with a few others, this made a total of about 20 people. We got out to Ha Long City, after a very interesting bus ride where we for a while actually were driving in the wrong direction on the elevated highway. (The driver saw a traffic jam up ahead and just turned the bus around and drove back to find another way!) Ha Long City is a port city, and was the first place the US forces went ashore in Northern Vietnam in the Vietnam War. Today it is all about tourism. There are hundreds of tourist boats, almost all looking the same. Luckily it was the down season when I was there, so the number of boats in the harbor outnumbered those out on the water, several times.

As soon as we got out of the harbor and headed to the famous islands, I could understand why these islands have such a mystical story attached to them. A light morning mist covered most of the islands, and behind the closest ones, we could see the outlines, of hundreds. There are about 3000 islands in Ha Long Bay, but only 1990 are recognized as nice enough to be on the UNESCO World Heritage list. About half of the islands have names, and many have huge caves, giving shelter to humans and animals for thousands of years. The one cave we visited was a really large one, and the one that most of the tourists get to see. It is lit up with different colors, and the guides use lasers to point at different rock formations that look like animals if they tell you they do. In one of the cave's three chambers, there is a fresh water lake, from which local fishermen have been collecting drinking water up till just about 30 years ago.

When we got out of the cave, we got into some kayaks and started paddling around for about an hour. I was in the same kayak as Jared, a 28-year-old American man who has been traveling for years and years, only working a little in between to make money for the next trip. We shared a cabin in the boat, and decided to travel together to Lao. We paddled up close to several islands, looking at the beautiful green and red corals that were sticking up from the water because of the low tide. We also found a jellyfish that looked like a basketball, only twice the size. In many ways it reminded me about an eye. We decided not to touch it, but moved it around with our oars, only to see it swim right back to the rocks again.

When we got back to the main boat again, we climbed up on the roof and jumped in. I think I jumped about four or five times, and the water was refreshing, but not as cold as many of the Americans claimed. Swimming felt awesome, after hundreds of hours on trains and buses, the only thing that felt better than a swim was the massage I had in Hanoi.

On the tourist boats the price for beer is quite expensive. They wanted 2 USD for a bottle, so selling cheaper goods to the tourists is a big business. Whenever our boat stopped, some vendors in small boats would come up to us and try to sell us something from their large variety of cookies and beer. They would say "Buy, buy, buy!" and we got really tired of this after a short while. If you bought a bottle of beer from these ladies, you had to pay a fee to the crew of the boat, but since the vendors sold the beer for less than half the price of the bar in the boat, you could get two beer from the vendors for the same price as one in the bar, including the penalty fee. However, they did of course not collect the fee when we bought beer without the crew seeing it.

The food on the boat was not the best, but it tasted all right, and after many activities we were all hungry. I was eating as much as I could, and there was always enough food. It was actually full moon the night we spent out on the water, and we were all sitting out on the different decks. I liked to sit at the bow, fishing for squid, drinking some beer, and talking to some new friends that I met on the boat, Jiby (20) from Australia, and Pedro (36) from Chile. We all had our bait right below the light bulb, but there was no squid to catch that night. Just sitting on the bow, with my legs hanging down from the gunwale, feeling the fresh air between my toes, seeing the full moon, and smelling the ocean was more than enough of an experience. When I was in the middle of Siberia, I knew for sure that I could never live that far away from the ocean.

The following day we just cruised around, looking at beautiful islands, and enjoying a filling lunch before we got back on the bus to Hanoi.