Vietnam’s Hạ Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is like no other place on earth. The emerald waters are dotted with some 1600 limestone karsts (hump-shaped islands) with lots of beaches, caves and other wonders lurking around. It’s been inhabited for over 16,000 years, with today’s residents being mostly fishers and pearl farmers living in little floating villages. It was the site of the first raising of the national flag of the new nation in 1948. Today, the bay is always heavily littered with ships and boats of all sizes and sorts. Among them are cruise ships that offer passengers excursions of one or more nights aboard. Which was an experience that we decided we just couldn’t allow to sail past us.

Our departure point in Hanoi is the Hanoi Opera House, a splendid colonial structure built by the French over a century ago. It’s an enticing building that surely must have an equally appealing interior, and we just might have to put a tour of it on our itinerary the next time we’re in Hanoi. It’s the pickup point for quite a few tours and outings, including our own. Vendors and hustlers know a gold mine when they see it, and as soon as our Grab driver drops us there at 7:00 in the morning, a couple of ladies start trying to sell us hats and fans.

When our bus arrives, it’s nearly empty, and no one else gets on with us. That’s because, as we will learn, it has many other pickups to make at various locations. And we’re pretty much at the beginning of the course. It stops at a number of hotels and hostels; and there is an assistant on a motorbike speeding ahead of us to meet the passengers and assist them with their luggage. Oh well, at least we get in a circuitous tour of the city as a bonus for our money; at one point we cross paths with a long stream of rickshaws bearing passengers.

After seeing numerous sectors of the city for a while in this fashion, we are finally on the road for a three-hour ride, which includes a lengthy layover at a rest stop with a restaurant and of course plenty of gift shops. When we arrive in Ha Long Bay, we unload at a dockside hotel, where we have about an hour to wait in the lobby before our ship docks, unloads, and prepares for our arrival. An attendant loads all our bags onto a cart and hauls them aboard for us, so we have only ourselves and our anticipation to haul. And voila we are off on a once in a lifetime (probably) three-day, two-night cruise of Ha Long Bay.

While our gear is finding its way to our cabin, we find our way to the dining deck, where we are registered and given our brief orientation. Then it’s time for our first meal of the cruise. Since we are vegetarians, and apparently the only ones aboard, our lunch is brought to our table rather than placed on the buffet tables. It consists of strands of some kind of white vegetable that looks like spaghetti, strands of carrots, macaroni in marinade, and tofu in a red sauce. No water is served, so we request some from the waiter, who brings us two cans of mineral water — which is billed to us. So you gotta be careful what you ask for. And maybe bring your own water, which we normally do anyway.

Then we check into our cabin and find it very much to our satisfaction. It has a large, comfortable bed and a good view (all cabins on this vessel come with windows) with a sliding glass door leading onto a little balcony. It’s air-conditioned and features a refrigerator, an electric kettle for making tea or coffee (as well as a supply of tea and coffee) and two refillable bottles of water. It hardly could be better.

At 2:15, we and many other passengers load onto a boat to shuttle over to what is called the pearl farm. Which is not, of course, a farm tilled by tractors or mules, but a farm floating on the water. We’ll be touring it the following day. But on this day, the purpose of coming here is that it’s also the departure point for rental kayaks.

So for the next hour or so, we give our biceps a good workout, as we poke around the many inlets and niches and nooks and crooks and crannies — one of which is the final resting place of somebody’s wrecked houseboat. But the gorgeous scenery is only marred by the much smaller detritus — the all too frequent discarded bottles, cans, and wrappers.

Okay, now that our arms have been exhausted, it’s the legs’ turn. The next stop is the largest cave on the island, Sung Sot (Surprise) Cave. After the boat docks, we have to ascend about 100 steps up a staircase, giving our lower limbs a pretty good workout already.

Then we go on to explore the cave, following a guide. It reaches a height of nearly 1000 feet, and has a length of more than half a mile, divided into three sections. And the formations and lighting are quite worthy of Broadway — though it looks more fairy tale inspired. And in a sense it is. There’s an ancient legend about this cave and the area around it, a legend involving a 3-year-old child who descended from the heavens to aid a king in battle (they must have made toddlers really strong in those days) and then ascended again. And some of the formations in the cave are supposed to be his petrified swords and horse hoofprints. Or something like that.

With both halves of our anatomy thoroughly exercised, we shuttle back to home base to freshen up a bit before dinner. Outside our cabin window, we see a couple of ladies floating by in little boats that might be called canteen boats, stocked with snacks which they apparently sell to passengers with whom they conduct transactions overboard — which would require lowering money and raising the goodies on a rope, we assume. Alas, we don’t have an opportunity to actually witness such a spectacle.

On the sun deck, there is a cooking class before dinner, which we participate in — though the “cooking” turns out to be just assemblage. The chef shows us how to make spring rolls, rolling up rice paper with strips of egg, lettuce, fried onion, mint, carrot, cucumber, noodles, and (for those inclined, which we are not) pork. Not bad for our premiere venture into Vietnamese culinary art.

Dinner is also on the sun deck, and there is a selection of placid music filling the air. Except that one particular tune stands out because it happens to be the theme song from, um, the film Titanic. Maybe something got lost in translation.

In contrast to the rather meager lunch we had, dinner is bursting the cornucopia at the seams. They just keep bringing us more dishes — do we really look that big and ravenous? There are fried potatoes, pumpkin soup. then curried vegetables, including more potatoes. Are they fattening us up for the kill? One thing we notice is that they seem to believe we have a tremendous fondness for ketchup; it makes multiple appearances, with all kinds of dishes, during our meals on board. Is ketchup really that synonymous with American grub?

Stuffed to the gills, we retire to our cabin to rest up for our second day (which will be actually our first full day) on the waters of Ha Long Bay.

Events occurred 7/8/2025