Halong Bay - Day 1

Today felt like a high school field trip for the first part of the day. I got to try my rain cover out on the way to the tour meeting place when it started to pour buckets. It took the rest of the morning for the pants I'd worn to dry out but luckily I was wearing thin clothing, which is something I think I'll do for the rest of the trip.

We endured the three and a half hour bus ride to Halong City from Hanoi, where we boarded our suprisingly comfortable, well-appointed boat. I'm quite pleased with my cabin, and the boat is only lodging six of us tourists, so there is a lot of room to stretch out, and I have a large room to myself.

The scenery in Halong Bay was truly amazing. There are something like 1600 islands that are limestone outcroppings that jut up from the floor of the bay. The faces of these islands are sheer cliffs, and pretty much all of them are uninhabitable, but they are fun to look at. The scenery reminds me of Phang-Nga Bay in southern Thailand, but instead of containing small caves, some of these islands have huge caverns within them.

We visited one of these large caverns. The ceiling looked like upside-down sand dunes, and water dripped at points from the ceiling into freshwater pools, since this is rainwater that seeps through the limestone. Some of the formations that the limestone had eroded into resembled animals, like turtles or bats. One structure looked especially like an erect penis and had been lit up in a red-colored floodlight to heighten this effect.

The rest of the day was occupied with relaxation on the sun deck of the boat, a little swimming, and a lot of eating. The highlight of the meals so far has been the fresh seafood prepared in various ways, like braised whole fish, and whole steamed crabs. Anyway, the sun and the swimming tired me out, and I slept the whole night through without waking up, an irregularity for me.