Day 221: Driving to Ha Long Bay — Boarding Our Junk Boat
By 8 am we were in our van and driving away from the lovely Tam Coc Garden — a place we all really enjoyed. An oasis from the heat.
In the car ride — a fascinating four-hour ride through small towns and rural countryside — Willa was reading us jokes. She asked: “What do you call a sheep with no legs?” My answer: “A baaaah-dy.” Haha, no, it was “a cloud.” My answer was better.
We made one stop at a hot-as-Aswan-in-May and just as airless roadside market and restroom. Got some crackers for the road and stretched. The women’s room stalls had both no doors — just dividers — AND squatty holes in the ground. An interesting combo. Willa used the one precious western toilet with door.
At one point we saw hundreds of mopeds going past us on the two-lane highway in the opposite direction. Our guide explained that it was school kids heading home for lunch midday.
Eventually we arrived at Ha Long Bay harbor and boarded the Valentine, a creaky wooden sleeper boat from the company Indochina Sails with two cabins and a crew of four. All for us! As we walked the walkway to board, we spotted a bloated dead rat bobbing comically in the water. We wanted rats, we got one! The skipper was horrified and tried to distract us.
The heat and humidity continues to shock even the locals, like our on-board helper/host guy, Jax. He’s a 25-year-old trainee who loves playing with the kids.
Ha Long Bay is a major bay dotted with nearly 2,000 islands. The islands are limestone masses jutting straight up out of the water, and covered in bright green trees. The water is a cloudy greenish turquoise. It looks identical to Phang Nga Bay in Thailand, where we did a day trip on our honeymoon 9 years ago.
In the afternoon we visited Hang Sung Sot to see a massive cave with three chambers that was discovered by two French women taking cover from a storm in 1911. Didn’t know we’d be doing so much cave stuff in Vietnam?
I wasn’t that psyched to get off the AC’d boat into the heat to traipse around caves with hoards of Chinese tourists.
But it wasn’t that crowded and we decided it was worth it to see a very Batman-esque cave.
We discussed whether the kids are growing immune to spectacular new sights. This might’ve been a kid-favorite seven months ago. Now they’re kind of like [bored Jerry Seinfeld voice]: bing bong, cave, can we go now?
Grrr.
I also think heat has a huge impact. Our toughest tourism times have all been in extreme heat.
Anyway, here we go analyzing and going in circles again about their behavior. It’s such an annoying trap of a conversation! Stop!!
Mercifully when we got back Jax jumped into a few card games with the kids in the lounge area while we drank a G+T on the roofdeck. The temp was so nice with the breeze once the sun went down.
By 6:30 the chef came up and demo’d how to make things like carrot flowers and apple swans. At first I was kind of uninterested in this one, but I realized it was good for our kids, who are eating out constantly, to see the hard work, effort, people and practice that go into restaurant meals — even seemingly small things like tomato-skin “rose” plate garnishes. These things don’t just appear. The kids were mesmerized.
Willa and I did our Splits Challenge stretches on the deck, then we all showered and had dinner at 7:30.
The kids were SO. BAD. at the table. Why? Why? Whyyyyyy??? Talking rudely, not using their manners, whining, getting up from the table and jumping on the couch in the lounge. Finally ejected them to their room to watch a show (infuriating that they finagled a reward out of such naughtiness), and had the dinner table to ourselves to… analyze their behavior and what we think we must be doing wrong.
At least this time we caught ourselves and quickly changed the subject!!
We were all in bed by 9 — way too late for James, who was obviously just exhausted. They’re in their own room next door, not in a connecting room. I was a little nervous about this arrangement — kids basically in their own hotel room down the hall — but wasn’t willing to sacrifice being in my own room for the first time since Mongolia over a month ago.
Sure enough, at 1:30 am, Willa came down the hall into our room saying James had fallen out of his bed on his head and was wailing. Ha! Hadn’t heard a thing obvs. When I went in there he was indeed crying and on the floor but he was fine. I ended up sleeping in their room for the rest of the night. Of course he didn’t remember any of it the next morning.
MISC:
We loved Tam Coc Gardens in Ninh Binh’s deathly heat because it was a surprise spell of downtime that we wanted so badly — our real first since Mongolia. It was even better than Mongolia because, unlike the Gobi, we had a pool to distract the kids. That meant we got to do things like read, write and draw in peace. I know it sounds crazy — but as Teddy said in yesterday’s post, that is rare this year. And it’s like the number one thing we wanted out of the experience for ourselves.
Ha Long Bay is lovely, but it’s like spending a boat holiday with a few thousand of your closest sunburned cruising tourist friends. Everyone docking in the same place, everyone seeing the same sights. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we regret coming, but I’d def call it a tourist trap. Certainly lacks the special-ness, the remote-ness — and the casual barefoot cool — of the Amazon river boat.
And Teddy will probably talk about the plastic-in-the-water trash situation tomorrow. Blechh.
