Ha Long Bay - World's 8th Wonder

We booked ourselves a two day tour of Ha Long Bay on the 3rd December. We hopped onto our tour bus at Hanoi and headed for a four hour journey east. En route Kiri pointed out on several occasions restaurants along the road that has signs with pictures of dogs or cats... I sincerely hoped that our guide, Thui, hadn't planned a lunch stop at any of those! In the meantime he kindly told us about the programme and gave us some very interesting facts about Ha Long Bay! Legend says that a celestial dragon and her army of children were sent by the Emperor to stop an invasion by spitting out pearls that formed islands and razor sharp mountains in the path of enemy boats... After their victory, the Dragons decided to stay on and lived among the limestone islands scattered around the bay. Hence the name of Ha Long: "Descending Dragons". Some people today still claim that sea monsters and other mythical creatures roam around these islands! So needless to say that I got very excited at the prospect of snapping a few sea dragons with my camera and obtain wealth and fame from selling my pictures to some British Tabloid! On arrival the weather was misty and warm, an ideal environment for dragons to hide, well at least that's what I thought... We boarded a boat, more precisely a junk. It was going to be our home for the next two days. We were in for a treat! The bay lived up to its reputation. Though the light fog was consistently present, it added a certain air of mystery to the experience. The limestone formations were spectacular and looked like boat sails, or maybe roofs for dragon houses! Enough about bloody dragons I say! So we sailed along with many other junks, on which many other tourists were being pampered by their respective crews. The departure from the harbour was not dissimilar to Vietnam's road traffic! The junks were all racing like mad, blowing their horns at each other, narrowly avoid hitting the smaller fishing barges that were scattered randomly around the bay. I did very early on spot the emplacement of boat's life jackets! At lunch, on the boat, we were served wonderful food including some of the strangest prawns I've ever seen. The crew called them grasshopper shrimps, but they looked more like praying mantis to me and tasted rather good, more like lobster than prawn. We docked onto a small island, got of the boat and made our way to a place called Hang Sung Sot, also called the Amazing Cave. It was a comprised of three chambers and made up a huge complex of caves. Rocks, stalagmites and stalactites invariably resembled creatures, deities such as a Laughing Buddha, some giant turtle and one formation in particular was popular with local ladies... A rather huge pink phallic looking stalagmite that apparently had the property of making women very fertile upon rubbing it! You can imagine, there were many giggles echoing in the Cave! After that we headed back to the junk, chilled out until dinner and we got served another fantastic fest of sea food wonders, all flavoured with ginger, garlic, chillies, lemon grass and so on! Divine! And add to that the sound of the sea and the misty limestone mountains and one understands where Ha Long Bay is dubbed the eight wonder in the world. After dinner and a few beers, we headed to our cabin and the gently rocking of the boat send us quickly to sleep. The next day was a bit of an anti-climax. First we headed back to shore sooner that what we had anticipated, had lunch in a tacky hotel rather than the boat and finally I was struck by Deli Belly Syndrome, and found myself running to the loo a few times and reaching out for the Immodium! Bit having been 5 days in Vietnam, I was surprised it hadn't hit me earlier! Such is life and I had to look forward to a night train journey from Hanoi to Hue with a dodgy tummy... To be continued... JM