Ha Long Bay

Back when we were in Hanoi, we took a three-day cruise on Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is one of those places that you can’t quite capture in pictures because it surrounds you and the scenery is constantly changing.

We had time to relax, read books and shuttle around to some tourist sites.

Logan on the upper deck.

The bay was full of cruise ships alongside smaller fishing vessels and ‘boat shops’ that would stop at the ships to sell goods to tourists.

The first evening we visited a cave.

We were the only guests on our cruise (of about 40 people) to opt for the three-day tour, so they transferred us to a smaller ship on the second day that ferried us to various areas of the bay. It seemed overkill to have a relatively large ship with staff twice as large as our family.

We visited one of the few remaining floating villages in the bay.

Our guide also took us to an inner part of an island that often has monkeys. The odd part was that all the other tourist were Chinese, whereas all the tourist in the cave the day before had been Western. We didn’t have a choice of which sites we were going to see when we booked the cruise, so it appears the tour agencies decide who goes where and, for some reason they seem to separate the Western and Chinese tourists.

We did get to see monkeys. We have seen quite a few this year, but this was the most that we have seen at any one time (note mom with a baby in the center). They jumped from limb to limb frequently too, so they were the most entertaining monkeys thus far.

We visited a cultivated pearl farm and saw how to plant a bead inside an oyster to make a pearl. Then a staff woman violently stabbed an oyster to retrieve a pearl, as a kid in our group screamed, “She killed it!” Not that I wanted to wear pearls, but I am even less excited about them now.

On our cruise boat.

At one of the stops, we climbed to a viewpoint.

Back at the dock, Ethan discovered he could do a vertical jump, and so he did… over and over and over…