Day 3- April 19, 2009

Day 3: Halong Bay

We left Hanoi at 8:30am after having a 5-star buffet breakfast at the Melia Hanoi Hotel. It’s a 4-hour ride to Halong City. The freeway has only 2 lanes for both directions that are separated by a yellow line in the middle. It’s kind of scary to see fast traffic of both lanes seemingly running into each other. But of course, magically everyone did their best and managed to drive on the freeway safely. We saw rice fields along the way and interesting housing being developed. The houses tended to be tall, up to 4-storys high. They looked kind of skinny since the widths of the houses were mostly around 12 feet. The houses have many kinds of architectural styles that resemble those from Europe. We had a bathroom break after our 2-hour ride at a giant gift shop of the White Marble Factory. The marble sculptures were beautiful and extremely heavy so no one bought anything.
Halong City has many restaurants and hotels, gift shops and services to accommodate millions of visitors a year. We boarded our private boat at our private dock, which had the view of the brand new bridge that was built by a Japanese company. Two small water taxis took up to our boat, Bhaya. Our Bhaya had 4 deck levels. The first two were for cabins. The third was the dining area. The top one was the viewing deck. The whole ship accommodated our 38-person group nicely and charmingly. The crewmembers welcomed us with a red carpet, shower of rose petals, cold towels and water. We were immediately led to our dining area where a buffet lunch style was served with complimentary grapefruit mimosa. The food included dishes of local crab, fish and shrimp. They tasted amazingly fresh and sweet. The ship was crewed along the bay, which has more than 1,700 islands. Most of the islands were not inhabited because of their small size and steepness. The scenery is breath taking with blue water, sunlight, breeze and the quietness of nature.

After lunch, I went on a scenery trip on the water taxi. We then moved to small rowing boats in groups of 4. We were so relaxed and enjoyed the scenery as our local lady rowed us through the Sky Gate, which is the open space under a giant island. We saw a fishing village along the way. With $15,000, you can buy a float house and live here! There are small schools that go up to fifth grade for local children.

We came back to the top deck at 5 pm for a cooking lesson. We were taught about the ingredients of the seafood crispy rolls and rolled them ourselves for the staff to fry them. People were delighted with the happy hour at the satellite bar and enjoyed the freshly made crispy rolls that we had just put together.

The dinner was so amazing. A six-course meal was served. The staff was very detail oriented and attentive. I enjoyed my sea bass dish very much. At 9pm, I was totally beat so I headed back to my room. On my way, I saw the staff catching calamari, which would then be used for the next-day meal. While I was in my deep sleep, the rest of the group enjoyed watching “Indochine”, a classic movie about Vietnam in the 1940s. Part of the movie was filmed in Halong Bay.