Halong Bay Cruise, 1

Perhaps our chief interest in visiting Vietnam was seeing the great karst pinnacles in Halong and Bai Tu Long bays, some of the greatest concentrations of these structures in the world. We have always enjoyed visiting mountainous areas and became of aware of karsts, both on land and sea, as early as 1983, after a visit to Japan. In 2008, we did the River Li cruise in China, seeing the great land accretion of them between Guilin and Yangshou, and we have seen plenty more in our retirement travels. There's a lot of limestone in the world, eroding away into towers, mountains, caves and sinkholes and a variety of other curiosities, but nowhere as numerous or scenic as these two bays off of northern Vietnam.

Halong Bay is by far the more popular of the cruises, which can take 1-3 days. Some 600 ships are licensed to operate in Halong Bay. Bai Tu Long Bay is very similar in terms of scenery, but further from Ha Long, and only 30 ships are licensed to tour it. We opted for the 3 day Bai Tu Long Bay cruise but--it's a long story I'll be unfolding here (cue the "three hour tour" music)--we actually saw Halong Bay.

On board our ship, the Dragon's Pearl 2, a diesel-powered junk, were 7 other couples, US, British, and Australian, a US family of four, and a single architecture grad student from Sydney. All very nice, friendly, and good-humored people. Amusingly, one of the passengers was a retired merchant ship's captain and another a retired diesel engineer. But I'm getting ahead of the story. The crew numbered about 7, all Vietnamese, of whom the guide, a steward, and the bartender spoke some English. A good combination, I thought.

We boarded and occupied our cabins in the early afternoon as the ship set forth into Halong Bay and a roadstead there that the cruise company, Indochina Junk, uses as an overnight anchorage.

Our luxury van dropped us off at a luxury hotel right on the harbor; luxuriously

Boarding the lighter (tender?) to take us to...

Dragon's Pearl 2

Our cabin, spartan but en suite; starboard, stern; not luxurious

And we're off; even from the harbor you can see plenty of the landscape we wanted
to see

Still pretty near the harbor; all this is in the Gulf of Tonkin, South China Sea;
calm like a lake for our three days

Dragon Pearl 2's figurehead

It was a bit hazy our first day out

Incipient arch

So after the usual safety talk, cruise talk, etc., the cook came up to give us a
lesson in Vietnamese cooking; pork spring rolls, which became our afternoon
snack

Though the sea was calm, you could see the tides are in the 8-10' range

Caves everywhere

Once we got to the roadstead, it was play-time; for the younger passengers; Vicki
and I would kayak the next day

Roadstead, with some of the bigger junks

Interim Update From Middle California

We're back in the States, hunkered down in our camper for a while. I can't disclose the location except to say the aroma of garlic growing in the fields nearby is very strong. We cut our southeast Asia trip a few weeks short--only Ho Chi Minh City was left among places we had not already visited--and, despite the outbreak of the virus in the US, we felt that the prospects for health care, should we need it, were better here than in Vietnam...or Laos or Cambodia. Vietnam, FWIW, had 16 cases, stemming from January, all recovered now. Sadly, the lack of tourism is really going to hurt the economies of the region, but that will be true nearly everywhere. In any case, we're here, recovering from jet lag (from Singapore it was a 14 hour flight), with plenty of time to get back to the blog. Now go wash your hands....

Sex And Violence At The Water Puppet Show*

Our next stop on the luxury trip to Ha Long and our cruise was in a village way off the freeway, Yen Duc, expressly built, I surmise, to feed and entertain luxury cruise travelers such as ourselves.

According to the Dung Dynasty scholar Quang Phuc Dong,** water puppetry began in the 11th century as something to do while the rice was growing. Almost certainly it is related to the monsoon. The stage typically is a pond built for theatrical purposes. Four or as many as eight puppeteers are concealed in a building at the head of the pond, manipulating the wooden/lacquered puppets through their motions by way of bamboo poles. The performance is accompanied by music (piped in, very loud), a chorus (similar to classical Greek theater) that comments on the action and sometimes warns the puppets of impending threats. Typically, half a dozen stories are told, chiefly of traditional village life. I was particularly impressed by the dragons and their gyrations, so to speak, resulting in a baby dragon, and the farmer violently chasing a fox away from his ducks. Afterwards, we were served the first of many very large Vietnamese meals, many, many courses. And then we were back in our luxury vans for the final leg of our trip to Ha Long.

Yen Duc Water Puppet Theater

The chorus belting out their lip-sync introduction

Traditional farming sketch

Dragons doing what dragons must do

An egg rises to the surface

And, voila, a baby dragon

Farmer fends off fox attacking his ducks

Violently

Battered fox retreats

Life is good

The puppeteers; all in (Orvis?) waders probably manufactured not far from here

Our table

And we are on the road again

Now passing the huge Ha Long beach, freshly groomed and planted

Lest anyone think of Ha Long as a quaint fishing village and port...

Clearly, there are big plans for this place

*the title refers to the late great Peter Cook's "Memoirs of a Miner"

**apologies to the late great theoretical linguist James McCawley...

On The Road To Ha Long

Vicki had booked us into a three-day cruise on Bai Tu Long Bay, followed by a couple days' light trekking in Sapa, up in the mountains. Travel to and from both places was to be by a "luxury" van, seating 9 in a pinch, but normally 6 or fewer. So on February 20th, we stowed some of our gear at the O'Gallery and then rode, in luxury, to Ha Long, the port from which the Halong Bay and Bai Tu Long Bay cruises depart. The road to Ha Long was memorable, for the luxury, the scenery (rice paddies), the company (especially a nice couple from Durham (England)), and the stops...one at an interesting bus-stop/shopping mega-center, the other for lunch and the long-awaited water puppet show. The latter will require its own separate post. Of course.

Interior of one of the four luxury vans we used; the ceiling
lights of course changed colors, from yellow, to green, to
pink, to blue, etc. We turned the TV off before any other
passengers loaded

After the hour it took us to get out of Hanoi, the scenery turned to rice paddies,
some with towns

Some with cemeteries

Towns

Interesting monuments and architecture

Traffic

And more rice paddies

At length, we turned into this unpromising-looking place, evidently a plant for
the fabrication of sculpture and lawn ornaments and such; our first rest-stop

Carrara?

Not the old-fashioned way

All kinds of cool Asian lawn and shrine ornaments

If too big for your suitcase, easily shipped back home

Satisfied customers

But wait! There's more! Under one football field sized roof, practically every
kind of product you can buy in Vietnam: clothing, hats, shoes, jewelry, food,
souvenirs, booze (including a cafe and full bar), art, candy, you name it

You can even buy pickled cobra  (tastes like pickled chicken
I was told)

An amazing, not to be missed place; after 30 minutes' restful shopping, we were
back on our way

Fortunately, luxury vans don't stop at places like this