Cruising on Ha Long Bay

We took Cebu Pacific's Maiden Voyage to Hanoi on April 10, 2008. Though the city had many interesting spots to visit, my sister, Maita, also wanted us to go on a tour outside Hanoi. In fact, if we had more time, she wanted to go on the 10-hour train ride to Beijing. But since we didn't have a Chinese Visa and we only had a week, we compromised with a one-day tour to Ha Long Bay.

Ha Long Bay, a recognized World Heritage Site, is on the northeast side of Vietnam and was a three-hour bus trip away from Hanoi. We were told we would be taking a junk tour around Ha Long Bay, seeing the interestingly-shaped islets and visiting the fishing village in the area. Expecting a Chinese junk from the books, I was pleasantly surprised to find the junk a bit different.

They had the same sails as their Chinese counterpart, but the Vietnamese junk carried French-inspired wooden balustrades with stairs that led up to a wide balcony or viewing deck, while sporting an Asian dragon at the head. It was a beautiful combination of East and West. The food was not bad, not very far from our food. They put tomatoes with their fried fish, too. The experience was like eating Filipino food with chopsticks.

And so off we went on our little cruise, just me and my sisters, Marie and Maita. Slowly, the islets came to view more clearly: large rocks of limestone standing side by side. And we slowly made our way between them and into the fishing village they initially hid.

Hmm, so that's a cuttlefish. I had never seen a live cuttlefish before. Interesting. The fishing village little huts floating on the bay. And they had little fish ponds where they stored (or bred, I'm not quite sure but the cuttlefish ponds seemed to have eggs in them) their catch. There were also crabs, shrimps, and shellfish of some sort that I had never seen before, either.

After the fishing village, we continued to cruise, and our guide pointed two stones to us. He said, they were the "Kissing Stones." Some people also called them the Fighting Cock Islands.

Further on we went, and we made a stop to explore one of the caves of Ha Long Bay.

Breathtaking. That was how it looked like in a word. It was a huge cave with its own myth. But even if one doesn't know it, one can derive his own story just by looking at the stones. There were what looked like giant turtles (Maita thinks they really were turtles, fossilized), and one that looked like an eagle's wing. There was even one that looked like a stylized lion. The lighting effects, not the artificial lighting, but the natural lighting that came in through some cracks and openings were beautiful. When I see things like the stones in the cave, I can't help appreciate Nature as an artist, whose masterpieces we usually take for granted.