Part 3 -- Ha Long Bay -- Carl & Steve's Vietnam/Cambodia adventures continue

In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous
 --Aristotle

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February 6, 2014: Hạ Long Bay 

Hi again everyone and welcome to Hạ Long Bay, literally the "descending dragon bay", which I'll explain in a moment.  It was the next stop on our Friends of Dave AMA Waterways Vietnam/Cambodia tour and cruise.   

It's February 6th, 2014 and we're still in Vietnam, having just left Hanoi, and busing to Halong City and the Bai Chay pier.  The smaller ship above on the left is ours for the rest of the day and most all of tomorrow.

I saw bright blue-sky pictures of this magical place many years ago, probably in National Geographic or some such magazine.  At the time I never imagined I'd be there someday.   But here we are, just on board our "Junk" and already being wined and dined by a really great crew...and snapping a selfie.

Hạ Long Bay one of the Seven Scenic Wonders of the World, it is another UNESCO World Heritage Site.  We seem to run into those in our travels lately.

Hạ Long Bay covers nearly a thousand square miles. It consists of a dense cluster of some 1,600 limestone monolithic islands, with each topped with thick jungle vegetation, rising quite spectacularly from the bay.  

Several of the islands are hollow, with enormous caves.  

There are two bigger islands, that have permanent inhabitants, as well as tourist facilities including hotels and beaches. There are also a number of beautiful beaches on the smaller islands as well.  We were doing something much more fun than hotels and beaches, however, living the high-life on our 'junk', however briefly, and enjoying the fantastic scenery. 

Junks sure aren't what they used to be, eh?

The limestone in this bay has gone through 500 million years of formation in different conditions and environments. The evolution of this karst has taken 20 million years under the impact of the tropical wet climate. Limestone tends to melt in the rain.  There are basically two seasons there, hot and steamy, cool and rainy.   

We hit it on an in-between day, cool with a disappointing fog taking much of the color from our island pictures, at least when I had to shoot right through it on our first day.  Things got better the next day, but we never saw the sun while there. 

As you might expect, there are legends that go with this special place, and because of where it's located, naturally, dragons are involved. 

According to local legend, when Vietnam had just started to develop into a country, they had to fight against invaders.  Vietnam fighting invaders? Well surprise, surprise.  That defending Vietnam situation seems like something that never really ever stopped until fairly recent times. 

Anyway, to assist the Vietnamese in defending their country, the gods sent a family of dragons as protectors. This family of dragons began spitting out jewels and jade.  

These jewels turned into the islands and islets dotting the bay, linking together to form a great wall against the invaders. 

By magic, numerous rock mountains abruptly appeared on the sea, ahead of invaders' ships; the forward ships struck the rocks as well as each other. After winning the battle, the dragons did a little sightseeing around the world, and then decided to come back and live in this bay. The place where the mother dragon descended was named Hạ Long, or, as I said, descending dragon. 

One of our highlights here was each couple boarding these little boats with a personal rower to get us up close and personal with some local residents' homes there.  You can boat right along with us in the slideshow at the end of this travelogue.

  

Around 1,600 people live on Hạ Long Bay in four fishing villages.  

They live on these floating houses and are sustained through fishing and marine aquaculture.  They fish for some 200 species of fish and around 450 different kinds of mollusks, many of which they have cultivated themselves.  

Here the floating 'supermarket' delivers the days' fresh produce.  As we saw in Hanoi, the Vietnamese like their veggies fresh, no matter where they live. 

The next day we cruised down to Sung Sot Cave.  

Sung Sot means Surprise Cave, or Amazing Cave, and is considered one of the most spectacular and largest of the grottoes in the area.
 The added lighting gave the place a wonderful glow.

Its two chambers contain large and numerous stalactites and stalagmites.  There are several more spectacular cave pictures in the slideshow.  

After leaving the cave, we headed back to shore for some shopping and buying at a little gallery on the dock.  I liked and bought this watercolor.

After that we were returned to the ship to pack up and go back where we started. Next we caught a plane to fly to Siem Reap, Cambodia, but that's another travelogue for next time.  

To see the Hạ Long slideshow, press F11 for full-screen mode, then click
HERE
We'll see you next time in Siem Reap, Cambodia and start visiting some very old temples.

 Carl (& Steve )

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i before e

...except when you seize the moment and run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbor.

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Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.
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Part 2 - Hanoi, Part 2

Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars, etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish, and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons. -Douglas Adams, writer, dramatist, and musician (1952-2001)

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Today's Vietnam is no longer "a war"; it is a country of nearly 90 million 
people, with a new generation eager to move on. 
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Hi again everyone: 

Last time I showed you many of the Hanoi sights that we first discovered on foot on our day of arrival and the next full day.  I will do likewise this time, revisiting, among other things, the busy streets.  But this time from a different perspective.

I should tell you that we met up with our Friends of Dave group of 12, with whom we traveled for the rest of our AMA Waterways Cruise/package.  That is, from this point on we were traveling with a guide or two, and a great fun group at each place we went.  Dave's friends are like that.

Above is the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, our first stop on a day full of fun (and some not-so-fun-but-interesting) surprises.  The mausoleum falls into the latter category.  It was inspired by Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow, but incorporates some Vietnamese architectural elements, such as the sloping roof. The exterior is made of gray granite,  the interior is gray, black, and red polished stone.  

 Rules regarding dress and behavior are very strictly enforced by staff and the grumpy officious guards. Legs must be covered to below the knee, cameras are confiscated and returned after the visit.  Mine wasn't, confiscated that is...I guess the chunky little pack I wear on my belt confused them.  

 Visitors must be silent, and walk steadily in two lines. Hands must not be in pockets, arms must not be crossed. Smoking, drinking, eating, photography, and video taping are not permitted anywhere inside the mausoleum.  I did not risk sneaking a picture in there as spending the rest  of my vacation in a Hanoi jail just didn't appeal.  

 Okay, so we saw the body while diligently behaving all the rules (well I did, Steve had his eyes closed or something...dead bodies creep him out).

Next was the One Pillar Pagoda, a temple built of wood on a single stone pillar, and it's designed to resemble a lotus blossom, which is a Buddhist symbol of purity (since the beautiful lotus flower blossoms in a muddy pond). The temple was built by Emperor Lý Thái Tông, who ruled from 1028 to 1054. It was a little too crowded for us to climb up to, but you can get a glimpse of the shrine within in the slideshow at the end of this travelogue. 

Our next stop was the infamous "Hanoi Hilton".   The Hỏa Lò Prison was a prison used by the French colonists in Vietnam for political prisoners, and later by North Vietnam for prisoners of war during the Vietnam War.  That's when it was sarcastically called the "Hanoi Hilton".  The prison had been decommissioned,  and was mostly demolished during the 1990's, but the gatehouse was left as the museum we visited.

The prison was built in the 1860's by the French, when Vietnam was still part of French Indochina. The French called the prison Maison Centrale—literally, Central House, a traditional euphemism to denote prisons in France.  It was intended to hold Vietnamese prisoners, especially political prisoners agitating for independence, and who were often subjected to torture and execution.  It became a symbol of colonialist exploitation and of the bitterness of the Vietnamese towards the French.

The first American was sent there in 1964, during the Vietnam War, or as they called it, The American War.  It was but one site used by the North Vietnamese Army to house, torture and interrogate captured servicemen, mostly American pilots shot down during bombing raids.  But enough of the depressing stuff, let's have some beauty and fun!

Next we visited the Temple of Literature.  This beautiful (aren't they all) Confucian temple was built in 1070 and for nearly two centuries, despite the many wars and disasters, it has preserved many of the ancient architectural styles of many dynasties as well as the precious relics therefrom. 

 Major restorations to it took place in 1920, 1954 and lastly in 2000. 

Next came the aforementioned  wild and fun ride on the cyclos.  Almost everything happens in the streets in Hanoi. They resound with beeping horns and screeching brakes, and the traffic lights are still a relatively new phenomenon at most major intersections, and certainly not everyone obeys them. Women wind their way between the endless stream of motorbikes carrying baskets balanced on poles with freshly cut flowers, vegetables, fruits and chickens bound for market.  Steel girders are transported to building sites using either bicycles or a cyclo. 

The above pictures were sent by our wonderful Hanoi guide Quang Vu.

And yes, even live water buffalo are transported on motorbikes. 

 The city's sidewalks teem with entrepreneurs. Women set up portable food stands, and serve soups, rice, noodles, vegetables and fruit.  

We did eat the bananas, but the pineapple begs the question 'where and with what did she wash her hands?'.

Ah, there we were, in the thick of it all, first walking, then riding in our cozy cyclos, peddled  by our (hopefully) very experienced drivers.

This turned out to be a lot more fun than I had imagined, watching my driver taking me into seemingly impossible bottlenecks, and arriving safely on the other side unscathed and ready for another one.

In the slideshow you'll get to ride along and enjoy the excitement  and scenes along the way too, and observe that the coffeehouse craze is alive and well in Hanoi too.

Our last attraction of the day was a water puppet show.  I spent the whole day wondering what a water puppet even was, then later trying to figure out "how do they do that?".  Now I know, kinda, as will you, that water puppetry (Vietnamese: Múa rối nước, literally "puppets that dance on water") is a tradition that dates back as far as the 11th century when it originated as an amusement in the flooded rice paddies of northern Vietnam. Today's Vietnamese water puppetry is a high-tech variation on that ancient tradition.  All of the music was live, as provided by the orchestra above.

Internet photo

The puppets are made out of wood and then lacquered. The shows are performed in a waist-deep pool.  A long rod supports each puppet under the water and is used by the puppeteers, who are hidden behind a screen, to control them. Thus the puppets appear to be moving over the water. How they got them to dive over and under each other, and move so dang quickly, surely must have required some fast and muscular theatrics behind the curtain.  Can you move a 20 ft. long pole quickly through water?  I can't.  

Unfortunately the lighting in the theater was low, so my attempts to capture the fast-moving little devils were pretty hopeless, but I included a couple I took to give you an idea, and borrowed the one above one from the internet.  Simply an amazing show. 

  So to all that and more in the slideshow, go to full-screen (F11) mode and then click  

HERE

Next time we'll be in Ha Long Bay, where we overnighted on a junk.

Stay tuned... 

and please keep those comments and suggestions coming!  They are very much appreciated. 

Carl (& Steve)

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"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."

Mark Twain

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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” 
Mark Twain