11-3-19 - Boat cruise in Halong Bay
/Day 140. Kyle & Leanne joint blog.
Ok, today we have managed to successfully book our boat ride excursion out to explore Halong Bay and experience some of the 2,000-plus limestone islands that pepper the waters. Most of our 48 fellow passengers look young and single with the look in their eyes of hoping to meet someone today. When we book an excursion using TripAdvisor as our bible, the one piece of information not included is what classification our fellow excursion-mates fall into. There are a wide range of options including the young and single backpackers, the young couples, the honeymooners, the families with babies and toddlers, the families with teenagers and the white haired retired couples (aka as Q-tips as Kyle mom calls them). It would be great if you could filter the excursions on TripAdvisor to select families with teens but then again all the options would probably disappear as we haven’t seen any other families with teens for a long time now.
One young woman in our group is wearing a black off-shoulder lingerie top with full makeup and high heels for a day cruise with cave exploring and swimming. There is clearly the hope of romance on the boat, but then we realize her real intention. Good Instagram photos. At nearly every boat turn, she’s snapping away selfies and getting her friend to take photos in twenty different modeling poses. I guess to be worthy of traveling with a friend these days carries the requirement of being a really good photographer.
Halong Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage site and there are very proud of it. As we are sailing around the bay, we pass a random island rising out of the mountain with a UNESCO sign strategically placed in a tree so all passing boats can see it. We will encounter UNESCO flags on every island we stop and the stone walkways have walls made with the UNSESCO symbol.
We are enjoying the boat ride when….Bam!!! Our boat crashes into an almost identically-sized boat. For context these boats are a good 80 feet long and 20 feet wide. And we’ve all seen the Titanic. Kyle says that on TripAdvisor there was one review where the woman said her boat crashed twice and she was in fear of her life the entire day. The only thing our teens look like the fear is not getting back to land to get a Wi-Fi signal. The boat staff seems unfazed and there are no apparent passenger injuries so we dismiss it. In fact, we will full on run into another boat at the end of the day too. Perhaps bumper boats is a thing here?
We dock at Hang Sung Sot aka Surprise Cave which is the largest cave in Halong Bay and can fit 1,000 people. We scale stairs up to the cave entrance which overlooks the inside of the cave 15 stories high and then walk back downstairs into the cave maybe 6 stories down. The boat tour guide leads us through the cave exploration tour for the next hour. He asks the group if they know what stalagmites and stalactites are? Kyle decides to show-off the cave knowledge we learned in New Zealand from our guides – stalagmites might reach the ceiling (e.g. grow on the floor up) and stalactites need to hold on tight (e.g. grow from the ceiling down). The rest of the group seems entirely unimpressed with Kyle’s expansive spelunking vocabulary of two words. Anyway, check the box for the spelunking adventure today.
Back on the boat, it’s lunchtime. When signed up yesterday, they sent Kyle an e-mail asking if anyone as a vegetarian to which Kyle responded no. They also sent a menu which had chicken on it which usually satisfies the six non-fish eating members of the clan. When we board in the morning, one of the staff comes around asking about diet and Kyle responds six non-fish eaters. Well, not the response he was looking for as his face falls and he says that 70% of the food is seafood. Kyle tries to explain that nothing they sent asked if anyone was a non-seafood eater but he just walks away shaking his head.
It turns out that the food is served family style and since Leanne has agreed to eat seafood, she it told that she must abdicate her place at the family table and sit at another table with “normal” (aka seafood eating) fellow passengers. She is re-seated a table with three Germans and two Vietnamese passengers.
Leanne normally considers herself a decent conversationalist but no matter what she talked about or asked of her new lunch friends, she was met with “crickets” or one word answers. The other passengers were not even talking to each other. There is no WIFI or cellular on the boat so everyone just eats, stares, eats, stares. The silence gets pretty odd. Right about now, Leanne is wishing our Polish friend were at the table. She bets his Pol-glish and f-bombs can get a reaction out of this corpse-like table. There are days when other tourists are very open to meet someone new and then there are days when they apparently wish the over-talkative American tourist would just shut up and eat.
After lunch we head to Hang Luon bay that is an enclosed space for monkeys to live wild and free. Well that is wild and free with at least 500 tourists swinging by to say hello and throw mini bananas at you all day. We have the choice of paddling a sea kayak or taking a bamboo boat through a cave that opens into a safe haven for wild monkeys. At least 50 monkeys live here jumping and rock climbing better than the human rock climbers last week in Thailand. They even have ropes and platforms someone built for them. They are ready for the groups of tourists to throw them Bananas today but they give us enough fun as if they were starved. Justin is loving it as Asia has turned out to be monkey paradise teaming with all sorts of different monkeys in Nepal, India, Thailand and now Vietnam.
The last stop of the excursion is Titop Island which has a beach and option for swimming. Kyle, Justin & Corey end up swimming and declare the water super-salty but it does help them float. After, we enjoy the boat ride back through the numerous islands to the original port. The islands remind us of Thailand but far outnumbering them with over 2,000 islands.
Back at the hotel, we enjoy pool and make our predictions for the Amazing Race. We go back to watch the rest of the episodes including the season finale upon which the team Kyle predicted wins. Off to bed and to get prepared for another country tomorrow.
