A quiet night on Ha Long Bay. We are aboard a junk on the water after a day of cruising and sightseeing on the bay. Maggie and I are two in a party of eight that also includes a French couple, an Australian couple, and an Australian woman with her 8 year old son. We came down from Ha Noi by bus--a not exactly brutal four hour trip but long enough. Traffic was wall-to-wall tour buses and trucks. The scene at the docks was equally crowded with nmerous junks jostling to pick up passengers. Once we were on the water, the crowding eased a bit although we've never been out of sight of other boats.
Ha Long Bay is a World Heritage Site. Rock formations jut out of the water mostly in rounded shapes but these rock islands vary in size. One is the site of Surprise Cave, a three chambered limestone cavern. Here, too, we traveled with there crowd: boats at the dock and a steady parade of people sluicing through the cave. It's pretty spectacular, even with all of the people. Next up, we visited the Floating Village, a small community that makes its living on the sea and off the tourists. The afternoon was pretty much touching all of the bases on the tour. Dinner was good--this company feeds us well. We watched evening descend ona gray day from the upper deck and spent dinner and the evening in conversation. We dodged the karaoke, which apparently is expected. Our tour guide very much wanted us to karaoke but we just wanted to talk and play a silly parlor game. My kind of crowd.
The ride down to Ha Long took us past many fields and through small towns. I spotted four military cemeteries along the way. Very uniform and orderly markers inside some type of ceremonial enclosure. One had a statue of a revolutionary soldier holding his weapon boldly in the air. I also saw what looked like a tablet commemorating a community's dead in the war(s). Our route also passed many factories for western business and consumer products. I saw much small scale and retail enterprise at many points along our route. So even the North, with its revolutionary discipline, looks firmly capitalist.
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