Halong Bay

It should have come as no surprise when several dozen boats in Halong City Harbor began honking their horns at other boats, trying to make them get out of the way. We marveled at this. It was one of the few moments in a two-day excursion, however, that wasn't both eye-filling in all the best ways and perfectly serene.

A three-hour bus ride east of Hanoi, on the Gulf of Tonkin (for those of us around in the '60s, these names reverberate), Halong Bay has over 3000 islands rising out of its vast green waters. Most of them are tall limestone karsts covered with vegetation and riddled with caves you can crawl through. It's another Unesco World Heritage site. After visiting the Citadel in Hue, we weren't sure Unesco wasn't too promiscuous with this designation. But Halong Bay, one of the planet's natural wonders, is worth preserving for sure---and for ridding it of the garbage and oily discharges that get dumped in it.

At first we wondered if heading for the seashore on a drizzly day wasn't a mistake. It usually is. Once out on our boat, however, we were enchanted by these hundred- and 200-foot-tall strange gray-green mounds appearing and then vanishing in the mist. (See Joe's pix, up soon, for a sampling.)

The boat was a two-deck wooden junk, with a viewing and dining area, and six small but not claustrophobic cabins for the 12 passengers. Each cabin even had its own tiny reasonable facsimile of a modern bathroom. (Lonely Planet described the toilet facilities on one Laos boat trip we didn't take as "a dark hole in the deck.")

Our fellow passengers were a companionable group, and included Lynn, the Vietnamese-American dermatologist, her Vietnamese-American boyfriend Tom, an ER physician, and two Indian-American internists from New York. (They gave me a group consult on a bug-bite infection on my leg; they agreed that the Cipro I was taking would work, but why not add some faster-acting Doxycyclin, which I could purchase in Hanoi over the counter? I did so, for $1.25. My immunizations for this Southeast Asia trip, paid out of pocket (Joe's were covered by his Blue Cross-Blue Shield), came to more than $1,600 at the Berkshire Medical Center travel clinic. Makes you wonder.)

The food on the boat was good---numerous Vietnamese fish, pork and vegatable dishes---and we stopped at a floating fishing village, complete with floating primary school, to purchase additional delicacies that the boat's cook served up a few hours later. Joe and I had some oversized prawns and two crabs the size of hubcaps.

The crew of six were helpful and easy-going. One man in his mid-twenties spotted me reading Neil L. Jamieson's "Understanding Vietnam." (The cover of my Chinese knockoff copy lists the author as Nell L. Jamieson.) The guide asked me what I learned about Vietnam in this book.

I told him I had only just started reading it and was learning about traditional Vietnamese culture and the role in it of the ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang as a way of finding balance and harmony in societies, families and individual lives. I discoursed on yin and yang for two minutes, acting as if I knew what I was talking about. The guide produced a student's copybook and made notes on what I said.

The young man (whose name I regret I have forgotten) told Joe and me that he was not religious but his family was. His parents and seven brothers and sisters are all rice farmers who go to the pagoda to pray. He was the only member of his family to leave the village, and he was ambivalent about that. He has a higher income but dislikes the noise, dirt and expense of Hanoi. His family envy his income but not his way of life. And he envies much in their lives---the serenity, the ease of working only a few hours a day when it's not planting or harvesting season, the order, the predictability. He said with a laugh, "No TV in the village. Just rice wine. Cheap."

The guide says he misses village life---in Hanoi, "I think too much"---but he said sadly that he cannot imagine ever going back. It's too late---he is somebody else now.