Son of Return to Ha Long Bay

Here are a few photos from Ha Long Bay:

The campsite:

The lagoon at dusk:

Susan washes her feet:

Adam losing at chinese chess:


We had a bit of a hard time leaving Ha Long Bay. I don't mean emotionally, I mean, it was actually quite difficult to get off the island. We spent the night in Cat Ba Town, which is a resort town on Cat Ba Island. Unfortunately, our plans to hang out on the beach all day were foiled by a driving rainstorm. Then, we were supposed to catch a ferry back to the mainland at Haiphong at 2:45 pm. However, we stood out at the ferry pier in the rain and there was no ferry, nor any other passengers, in sight. A motorbike driver told us that the ferry was cancelled because of an impending typhoon. He was a pretty unreliable source, but his story was actually plausible. So we had to catch a bus across the island (the interior of the island was actually quite beautiful), to a different ferry on the sheltered side, to a minibus into Haiphong. When we got to Haiphong, we tried to find a bus to our next destination, Ninh Binh, only to find that the last one had left for the day. So, exhausted and frustrated, we decided to hop on a bus back to Hanoi where we spent the night at my place. So it was a somewhat frustrating end to an otherwise great trip.

This seems to be a common occurrence when travelling in Vietnam - last minute changes to travel plans due to natural disasters. When I left Sapa, I was informed that a landslide had closed the train track to the nearest station at Lao Cai, and I had to take a long mini-bus ride down some jarring dirt roads to a provincial station down the line. More recently, the rains (from Tropical Storm Kammura) have caused a lot of landslides and flooding around Sapa, and many people have died. I hope all the good folks I met up there are OK.