Halong Bay may have the most naturally picturesque and unique landscape we’ve encountered thus far on our trip. The way to see it is to take a 1 or 2 night cruise into the bay, then kayak around. Just a 4 hour drive from Hanoi, it is fairly easily accessible. It was a good little excursion, but not a great one. However, we were not disappointed by the scenery. Check out more pics here.
We were very lucky to have some great people on the people on the boat with us including Seb and Sam from England, Will and Ellie also from England, and a large group of Australian med students whom we blame for keeping us up way too late to play drinking games. We were not very lucky with the weather. It was fairly chilly, so we didn’t do any swimming. Besides all that, there wasn’t a lot to do.
The other downside of the area is that there are a ton of boats and very commercialized. On our first day, we stopped to climb to the top of one of the karst via some stairs. There were hundreds of drunk tourists from somewhere in Asia. At night, all the boats anchor in the same area, and it gets a little noisy (hard to complain about that one since our boat might have been the offender one night, obviously because of the Aussies). But the worst is that the water is not very clean where the boats anchor for the night. We were advised not to swim there. The good news is that I believe the boats are only allowed to anchor in a specific area so they don’t pollute the entire bay. One day we took another boat to a different spot where we kayaked and stopped at beaches to swim. There were no large boats and the water seemed much cleaner, but, again, it was just a little too chilly for a dip.
The boat we were on had about 9 cabins, and we were surprised at how big ours was. The food was plentiful, but just OK. The website boasted of multiple cooking classes and fishing. I am glad we didn’t book it based on those claims. The fishing was nothing more than dangling a bare hook off the side of the boat in hope of catching a squid. They told us that it was rare to catch a squid. Someone asked if anyone had ever caught one before, and suddenly the crews’ English wasn’t good enough to understand the question. The cooking classes were a joke. In the first class, we rolled fresh spring rolls. We didn’t prepare the ingredients, literally just rolled them. In the second class we rolled spring rolls again, but this time ones that were to be fried. In the last class, we watched someone carve flowers from vegetables. It wasn’t too disappointing however, because we didn’t book the trip because of the fishing or cooking classes.
Despite the negativity above, we did enjoy Halong Bay and would recommend it to anyone who is planning to visit Hanoi and has a few extra days. The sheer natural beauty makes it worth it. Just keep in mind that thousands of other people have already also figured this out, and it shows.
- Jake
