Island Hopping

A few blogging notes:

1: Having lost a few days to boat-related lack of Internet access, we are a few days behind on posting here, so everything you read will have happened a day or two ago, but as we are on the other side of the International Date Line, they actually happened the day after a day or two ago, or something like that.

2: My blogging interface sucks. It is currently expressing that suckiness by randomly cropping many of the images I post. So click the images to see them in full glory, if that is important to you. Mostly I want to say this because I'd hate to have you all wondering why I keep taking photos of the left half of things, or keep cutting the heads of statues, but my laziness regarding tech outstrips my vanity, so I am unlikely to be able to fix the problem.

To the east of Hanoi, where the interlocking rivers that define the Hanoi region run to the sea, paralleled by bus loads of tourists, is a coastline defined by karst (eroded limestone) topography, and the UNESCO World Heritage Site called Ha Long Bay.

Although Ha Long gets all the press and the bulk of the tourists, there are other areas nearby that are equally impressive, but a little more off the beaten path. We caught a boat ride that took us out over three days. Sailing out of the Port City of Ha Long, we skirted by Ha Long Bay to spend most of our time around Dao Cong Du.

We spent three days on this boat, stepping off only to swim or take a kayak around to explore islets and inlets and caves and beaches. The weather was appropriately misty and moody, which made for pretty flat light for photographs, but made the jumbled peaks and random topography of our surroundings even more surreal.

Yeah, but it's a warm rain.

We spent several hours bumping around in Kayaks with a local guide and three other tourists. After 2 hours of noodling around through caves and around sea stacks, we realized what a good idea a guide was, as none of us could agree on which way was back to the boat. The geography is so random and jumbled and we (unfortunately) couldn't find direction by the sun. every corner led to more corners, and with almost 2000 islands in the bay, every cove becomes familiar. Luckily, many of the steep cliffs seemed to serve only to hide tiny enclosed beaches.

During our 3 hours in the kayaks, we passed several small single-family fishing boats, and a few anchored fish or crab farms. However, we never saw another tourist or tour boat. We had no idea how lucky we're were until later in the day when we had re-boarded our tender and swung through Ha Long Bay proper, in as our guide liked to call the "touristic" areas. The sea was thick with tourist junks, and jet-boats loaded with breathless Koreans zoomed all around. The difference was night and day, and we were glad to have avoided the reported all-night din of Karaoke found on those bigger tours.

So although we avoided some of the most famous and "touristic" caves, our guide took us for a side trip to Surprise Cave, so named because the simple, gaping entrance belies the confined wonders that lie behind. After passing a balcony over a closed lagoon on the inside of the little island, we wandered, stooped, and crawled though some tight spaces to enter a couple of grand halls of crystalline calcite.

Over lunch, we discovered that the group of three we were kayaking with included a couple of Young Aussie geologists, one who had recently taken an iconology course from two very good friends of ours - including one of my thesis supervisors.

The world is a very small place.

 

Posted with Blogsy