Ha Long Bay Cruise

A Ha Long Bay Cruise on a Vietanmese junk is an unforgettable experience, that is rivalled only by Thailand's Krabi

by Jack Corbett

Trouble was, this time the captain of our Vietnamese junk didn't maneuver for the perfect position in "the slot" between the two islands that would give me the perfect view to the West of the setting sun.  I had the perfect camera, but it wouldn't help me at sunset which is why I had to make use of every bit of graphics arts talent I possess to get the first picture for the top of this page.  And it looks fake as hell.  Not to worry however because later on I'll put up the picture that now occupies my hallway wall.  But that would be one I had already taken earlier in the afternoon.  But all of this techno camera jargon and my unrelenting quest for the perfect shot takes us away from the story, which is what non-photographers can expect out of a Ha Long Bay Cruise.  There was a cheaper version of our tour, which we could have done differently from the route we chose which would be one night on the Vietnamese junk and one night in a three star hotel on Cat Ba Island.  For my girlfriend and me it came out to $250.00 and everything was included except for our beer. The Marguerite, our boat, contrary to what one might imagine when one hears about Chinese junks, was far from a piece of junk.  There was a main room and bar where we ate our meals.   Our states room was one deck below this great room.   There were five cabins on each side of the boat, for ten altogether.   On the same deck behind the great room there were 8 or 10 additional cabins.  Each states room had its own private bathroom fully equipped with a shower and the other necessities.  It had been cold the year before in February and I had been on a junk nearly identical to this one.  It had a portable heater that I could leave on close to my bed or take into the bathroom with me.  That heater was a lifesaver.  Now it was summer so we used the air conditioner. The third deck was above the restaurant-bar room and additional cabins.  This was a very spacious sun deck (for a boat this size) where nearly everyone gathered to watch the setting sun and where I'd  futilely attempt to get a picture that would rival the one I had taken the year before.  Now I know everyone's going to say, "That's a great shot, that picture you took of all those junks at anchor in Ha Long Bay.  But I had gotten to be very spoiled by that Nikon D 300 camera and become overconfident.  It will take pictures that no other camera could get prior to its introduction a year ago.  I took that picture at night without a tripod.  The problem with it is it gets too blurry when you enlarge it so it won't cut it as a 30 by 20 inch framed picture for one of my condo walls.  I really should have taken that very small tripod along. Earlier in the day we had parked the boat at anchor.  And David and I had gone in the small skiff over to see the Hang Sung Sot Cave which means "Cave of Awe" named after the reaction of some of the locals upon seeing the cave for the first time.   This time my D-300 camera came through for me in spades.   I can take shots at incredibly high iso's with it.  It also has an anti vibration lens so I can shoot at speeds as low as a quarter to an eighth of a second without any ill affects whatsoever.  The following shots are without flash. It was now time to do a little kayaking.  David wanted to go back to the junk, however, where we had left our two Thai girlfriends fast asleep.  I had made a mistake and given both girls a Dramamine  for sea sickness because my girlfriend had showed signs of it before when we had taken the ferry to Koh Larn Island.  But the Ha Long Bay Cruise was no Ko Larn Island trip, not today it wasn't.   The sea was almost perfectly smooth.   I had felt the seas were not very rough on my ferry trips to Koh Larn back in Pattaya and had not come close to getting sea sick, but I didn't want to take any chances of my girlfriend getting sick at Ha Long Bay.  What I had forgotten is Dramamine often makes one sleepy.  So both girls went out like a light, which is a shame because my Thai girlfriend would prove to be a great companion the entire rest of the trip.  When I realized I'd be paddling a two person kayak without David for a partner I said to our tour group that had ventured to the caves from the Marguerite,  "Who will paddle with me?"  Our tour guide answered immediately, "I will."   Then I noticed that Adam, an Australian I had gotten on well with had no one for a partner.  So I wound up with Adam as a partner which left our North Vietnamese guide paddling solo.   Although Adam was in pretty good shape our guide appeared to be in tremendous shape so I felt it was the lesser of two evils leaving him without a partner which would have been more strenuous.  I don't know how many miles we paddled that Kayak, but Adam and I were the fastest two person crew of the group.   But our guide paddling alone was even faster than we were.    I really liked our guide.  I had bought a scrimshawed cane made out of buffalo horn at a large tourist shop on the way to Ha Long Bay in our van.  It was a two piece cane composed of two halves that screwed together while not being stored.   But a crack had started and the cane was ruined.  Our guide had taken it from me and had gone to several repair shops.  Finally on the last day at Ha Long Bay he returned it to me, not perfect by any means but repaired well enough to be serviceable enough to keep around the condo for a keep sake.   The young man was obviously tough, or at least that's the way I thought about him.   He was a gentleman through and through, but I couldn't help but think that had he been born thirty years earlier and had I gone to Vietnam back in 1969 right after graduating from college that we would have been enemies.   That's the kind of guys we were fighting against back then.   The next day we left the Marguerite, taking the small skiff to Cat Ba Island.  All meals were included on the entire trip.   So after having lunch at our hotel we faced a full afternoon's activity.  But we lost David and his girlfriend when David suddenly became sick and the pair took a taxi all the way back to Hanoi.  We were having lunch with Adam and one of the other guys, a Chinese from Singapore when Gus called.  We had lost Gus and his girlfriend from the onset when Gus literally missed the boat.  Now don't take that expression idly.  People actually do miss the boat and I don't mean this as a figure of speech.  On the way to our hotel the car Gus was traveling in back in Hanoi got stuck in heavy traffic and Gus was running an hour late.  Our van driver waited half an hour for him and then the group sped off to Ha Long Bay.  So Gus never made the Ha Long Bay Cruise.  Now he was calling me to tell me he and his girlfriend had just arrived in Ha Long Bay.  But Ha Long Bay is huge.  Cat Ba Island alone is over 200 square kilometers, so here we were on this island that was no doubt 30 miles from where Gus was now calling us from Ha Long Bay.  Our guide had two major events in store for us.  First was an hour's bicycling to Quan Y Cave.  The next day we would go to Monkey Island where we could do still more kayaking, look for monkeys or just swim or relax on the beach.  There was nothing really special about our bicycles which were just ordinary mountain bikes that probably would only cost a couple of hundred dollars.  But they seemed very reliable and the shifting mechanisms seemed pretty straight forward.  They were nothing like my Specialized road bike I had brought to Thailand with me from the U.S. which was very light and fast.  But the scenery was terrific, there was little traffic on the road we traveled on to the Cave, and the terrain was undemanding.  The only problem was, we just didn't get enough of it.   My girlfriend May, who is just 24 years old kept racing to the head of the group.  That's the great thing about having a very young girlfriend.  She can keep up with me.  Quan Y Cave was used for a hospital during the Vietnam War.  Or that's what we Americans call it because the Vietnamese refer to it as "The American War" because Vietnam's had many wars over the centuries many of them against China and in 1954 it had gained its independence from the French.  150 patients could be treated at the same time in Quan Y Cave where American bombs could not reach the inmates.  Considering just the day before I had already been in one large cave I wondered just how many other caves were used for hospitals or to protect munitions from American bombers.  That night as May and I ate dinner with Adam and our new friend from Singapore our guide stopped by our table.  "Did we want to go out to a bar after dinner?" he asked us.  Now that was a no brainer.  It took me just one second to say yes.  The bar was within walking distance of our hotel.  Located several streets behind the main drag that followed the beach, I got the distinct impression that it was one of our guide's favorite hangouts on Cat Ba Island.  I immediately ordered a beer, then offered a drink to our guide who politely refused while telling us he had already had a few beers and that he needed to be sharp the next day since he'd be doing his job looking out for us.   Then I noticed all the jars behind the bar.  Each jar contained clear liquor in some form or another with something disgusting fermenting in it.  One jar had sea snakes in it.  Another had sea horses.  And still another had a buffalo's testicle inside.  I was interested in the liquor ala Sea Snake. In an earlier trip to Saigon Gus and I had both bought ourselves Cobra Wine.  I had mine in the liquor display cabinet at my condo front entrance.   Inside the rather smallish bottle was a very real Cobra snake with its hooded head glaring out of the enclosure.   Although we had bought our bottles of Cobra Vino a year ago, neither of us had ever opened his bottle.  I had thought about it and had nearly brought it to the Girl Beer Bar where I'd dare the bar girls to have a toast with me just to see who was as crazy as me.  But although I might be crazy, I was in no mood for dying or making myself sick.  "Who knows how long that snake had been in the bottle," I kept asking myself.  I knew I had it for a year, but it might have been on a shelf for another year or two.  And what was the chemical reaction between a dead snake and whatever alcohol was in the bottle?  I had no clue.   But this was different.  This was a bar that had bottles of rice wine on display so that its more daring customers could drink their contents.   Hey....these North Vietnamese might have been killing Americans forty years ago and vice versa, but times have changed.  I just couldn't see our bartender let alone our tour guide poisoning us.  And no doubt the various wines, Vino a Sea Horse, Vino Sea Snake, and Vino Bull Balls got turned over pretty rapidly.  I trusted the bar, our bartender and our tour guide absolutely.  It was time to try what I had always been wanting to try and I was going to drag my new friends right into my private little dare. It was time for the rite of manhood to begin. We had to have the snake, I decided, and as if he were reading my mind our guide suddenly blurted out, "I know you want to do it (drink the snake wine) Jack."  "Definitely," I replied.  And then we ordered a shot glass for each of us.  Adam had drunken the evil stuff before.  He had been traveling throughout Vietnam for several weeks already as a journalist.  As he explained to me later, he was the "it guy" for a small Australian media company specializing in documentaries.  And during his Vietnam adventures he had seen a snake butchered in front of him after which he joined the Vietnamese in drinking the snake's blood, and eating its raw flesh.   But upon watching Adam chug his shot glass of Snake wine an on the video May took of our little group   an unmistakable look of distaste comes over his face.  Our companion from Singapore did far worse, because it took him at least three tries to get the entire shot of ghastly liquid down his throat as our guide kept encouraging him.  Now I don't know who was in charge of the music in the bar but I suspect it was our bartender.   It was terrific.  I could have stayed in the place forever.   Our guide asked us if we wanted to go to another bar.  He had a friend who could take us to a place that I suspected would have been more upscale.  But we were all content to just stay put.  The company and the music was good.  And we had a big day ahead of us the next day. We were picked up by a small boat and taken to a junk which was nothing like the luxurious Marguerite but comfortable enough for a two hour cruise.  Which took us straight to Monkey Island.  There we were immediately given the choice of taking a kayak out to another island about a mile away from the beach we had just landed upon.  We could have just relaxed there and done a little swimming or just laid around soaking up the sun.   But we were on Monkey Island no less and I wanted to see monkeys so help me God.  So where do you find monkeys.   Out in the jungle, that's where.  Any movie will tell you that, so I gathered my loyal troops together for an expedition into the Ha Long outback.  I knew I could count on Adam.   From Kayaking I had found he was in pretty good shape and he had been man enough to drink from the big snake, not once but at least twice.  And from the video our new friend from Singapore had proven to be immune from pain and fear.  After all, he was basically a non drinker who had pulled himself together to drink wine fermented a la Sea Snake, not once, but three times.  And anytime I want to walk for exercise my little Thai girlfriend, May is up to going with me, when practically every Westerner in our condo building or anywhere near it is dedicated totally to drinking with no exercise allowed in their perfect route to self annihilation.  There was this little trail up a steep incline from the beach.  But the higher we went the more the steep incline started to resemble a cliff.  Surprisingly my little girlfriend ate the whole thing up.  Finally we reached the top from which we had a great view the Cat Ba Island portion of Ha Long Bay.   Hoping to find an easy route back to our beach we hiked nearly to the bottom of the other side.  But as soon as it became obvious that there was no route back to our beach other than having to retrace our steps, May and I started to head back.  Our two companions continued to the very bottom where they had a chance to take a good look at a hotel which had looked promising to May and me but which was just a little too isolated.  In search of coca colas for May and me, I found a group of Vietnamese conversing together as they drank beer in a thatched hut.  A young man who was surrounded by pretty Vietnamese women offered me two cokes which he refused to charge me for.  He asked me in perfect English to join his little group but I politely told him I had to find my girlfriend first.  I found May under attack by a herd of monkeys. The whole scene reminded me of movies I had seen of Japanese warplanes swooping down on American ships at Pearl Harbor.  Both the planes and the monkeys were relentless.  And there was little May shooting video of the monkeys with a huge smile on her face.  In ten minutes all the monkeys disappeared. From Monkey Island the junk took us to a much larger junk which would take us back to the minivan that would take us back to Hanoi.  The larger junk was the Marguerite.  A few hours later we were back at our Hanoi Hotel.   The next day May and I went to the Army Museum.  Then we spent one final night at our hotel, got up early the next morning and flew back to Bangkok.   Will I be going back to Vietnam anytime soon?  You can bet on it.  Except for many of the dishonest lying taxi drivers in general I like the Vietnamese people very much, it's a beautiful country, it took just $150.00 to fly both my girlfriend and me to Hanoi and back, and there's a lot more to see there.  But we will be coming back for another Ha Long Bay Cruise.  It is that addicting. You can book your cruise here or just do what I did and do it through your hotel Next time we will certainly book again at the Viet Anh Hotel.  I cannot find a web site the Viet Anh, but there's many listings you can use from booking.com, agoda, Trip Advisor, etc.     Back to Return to Hanoi

 

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