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That song got into my head as soon as I saw we were headed to Ha Long Bay. What should have been disposable 70’s music by a band that I had to look up and am sure I have never heard of just will not go away. This post is an attempt to exorcise it…

Ha Long Bay is presented as pretty much the sine qua non of any trip to Vietnam. So, not wanting to rock the boat, we signed up for a two day cruise on a 12 cabin boat. Conventional travel photos show sunny blue skies and turquoise waters pierced by the vertical rocky islets and islands, quilted in verdant green blankets of jungle growth, for which the area is famous. But we eschew such conventional vistas, and opted instead for the moody greys of low ceilinged clouds and morning mists. If you are expecting oversaturated photos bursting with colour, expect elsewhere!

One thing that sets Ha Long Bay up for success is how uninspired everything is around it. Most people come here south from Hanoi, though we came from Minh Binh to the west, an area that also features these “karst” limestone formations but inland from the sea, earning it (one interpretation) or allowing it to coattail on the reputation of the real McCoy by creating (possibly the more accurate interpretation) the nickname “Ha Long on the land”. Oddly, we never heard Ha Long referred to as the “Minh Binh of the water”. Anyhow, as I was saying, from either the west or the north, the drive to Ha Long Bay is pretty uninspiring. The road is a six lane divided highway, with all the cars in lanes and each car on one’s side of the divider going in the same direction, so no fun there. The land is flat, and alternates among rice fields and villages and towns and industrial zones and cement factories (did I mention that limestone abounds), often with all of the above visible at once. The enormous bridge over the river threading through the Haiphong harbour, and the crazy large Haiphong port, are a bit of a wake-up call that Ha Long is coming up. Apartment buildings and (maybe) condos start to sprout up, and a new road on landfill whisks you into the Ha Long port area, which is across a causeway and on a little island apparently owned by one of the Vietnamese billionaires who have put the “flex” into “flexible communism”. The streets and buildings on the little island are regular and new and reminiscent of Florida or maybe Portugal, and the three storey vacation apartment complexes would be at home on the Gulf Coast – except that the biggest was built on spec before Covid and found few buyers, so sits with some units finished, with furniture and plants on the balconies, while the unsold units are shells, with no glass in the windows and no finishings inside, just empty boxes.

So this is what greets you. But then you join the others on your boat and board a tender that chugs out of the harbour about 20 or 30 minutes to a kind of holding bay with 20+ two, three and four storey cruisers moored, waiting for new passengers. This arrangement is explained by the fact that Ha Long Bay, which is kind of a single thing and which was recognized as a single thing by UNESCO, lies offshore two municipal/provincial jurisdictions, which decided to cooperate in administering it by dividing it arbitrarily into two “Bays” so as to compete for the docking and cruising fees paid by the boat operators. So our tender apparently took off from Ha Long Bay, but delivered us to a boat parked in Lan Ha Bay, which was the area in which we cruised and activitied. All of which was very pleasant. We viewed, we ate, we walked in the national park on the biggest island, we ate, we had a pre-dinner beer on the open deck, we ate, we got kayaks from a floating kayak station and paddled through a little tunnel into a large enclosed pool in which there was an oyster farm growing oysters on strings in the water, we viewed, and we ate. No pictures here of the eating, but here are some of all the other stuff.