After checking out of our hotel and storing our
luggage there, we were met by a guide who took us by taxi through the busy
streets, lined with all manner of activity, most notably innumerable people
breakfasting on pho on tiny plastic stools on the sidewalk at hundreds of
street restaurants. We arrived at the business office of our Halong Bay cruise
operator and boarded a van there for the morning-long trip to the coast.
Enroute, we traveled through village after
village lined with garage-like commercial establishments that typically were
the ground floor of a residential structure of several narrow storeys with
decorative facades in varying states of repair and topped by an open-air
covered rooftop living space. Roads,
buildings, everything seemed to be under construction or restoration and dust
hung heavily in the air and on every surface.
There's a reason for all those facemasks! Here, as elsewhere in the countryside, in the
middle of some sorry looking surroundings, we'd see a spectacular,
over-the-top, extravagant-by-any-measure villa.
The "Location, Location, Location" real estate mantra
obviously does not hold here! Despite
the roadside free-for-all that we're still not used to, we made it in one piece
to the harbor at Halong Bay, a very popular and prosperous-looking tourist center,
where we boarded the Treasure Junk shortly after noon.
As we enjoyed a multi-course seafood lunch, we
began to cruise through the dramatic limestone karst formations that dot the
large bay. The scenery is very dramatic,
much like that along the Li River in Guilin, China, with hundreds of small,
rounded islands for our boat to thread through. Even though this day held more
clouds than sun, the beauty is breathtaking.
Some of our fellow passengers kayaked around a large island, some of us
took our ship's tender to a small beach and some of us (guess who?!?) stayed on
board to set up his tripod for sunset photos.
One of us can report that the water at the beach was warm and the corals
and shells lovely!
After enjoying the darkening skies and the
crescent moon on the upper deck with some new friends from New Zealand, we
enjoyed happy hour with our smuggled wine (thanks for the tip, Eileen) in our
cabin.
Tom tried squid fishing after dinner while Mel
enjoyed the darkness and quiet of the upper deck. We caught an equal number of fish!
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