Exploring Halong Bay, Vietnam

[Forrest Walker]

This post starts with a photo of the fleet of junks we toured on in Halong bay. This a very comfortable way to spend a couple of days. great food, nice rooms, and beautiful cruise.

The reason Halong Bay is a tourist attraction is the huge number of Kursts in the bay. They make for dramatic backgrounds to photos, even on a day like we had which was grey, not blue.

The bay is home to thousands of indigenous fishermen in their sampans.

Our junk delivered us to a fishing village where women rowed out in bamboo boats to take us to their village where we would hopefully spend some money.

This was our rower in her village resting up before rowing us back out to the junk. They really work hard.

In fact they work so hard that I tipped our girl 100,000! That is 100,000 Dong, about US$5. There are so many zeros in the Vietnamese currency that the zero button on every ATM machine I used was worn away!

There were about ten of these boats rowing tourists around. We went past this scenic Kurst.

In short, the Halong Bay tour is almost mandatory for a tourist in Northern Vietnam. They do it right. The food is wonderful. If you are ever in Hanoi, take this tour!