Natural Wonders: Castles of Sea and Sky

Our last week in Vietnam before getting shanghaied into Laos (details to come in the next post), Emily and I made it all the way up to Hanoi, where we declared it more European than Saigon in an atmospheric, sprawling kind of way, but still just a big, ugly, grungy city. The sleeper bus took roughly 15 hours, so we crashed in Hanoi, but the next day we were off again. Our next destination was Ha Long Bay, the place I'd been most looking forward to visiting in Vietnam.

You know all those beautiful pictures of junks with wings for sails protected by enormous, majestic rocks in a bay of cool, emerald water that always seem to represent the natural beauty of Vietnam on guidebooks and travel sites? Here's one to refresh your memory or in case you have no clue what I'm talking about:

This photo is not mine. I took it from talk.onevietnam.org.

That's Ha Long Bay, and it is just as breathtaking in person as it is in professional photos.

We booked a two day, one night trip that included touring the bay and sleeping aboard a junk, kayaking through a cave into an enclosure in the middle of looming cliffs, visiting the "Surprising" cave, climbing one of the rocks for an aerial view of the bay and all of our food for the two days. It was brilliant. Our junk was a hip, wooden vessel, sadly without wings, that glided smoothly through the water, which was eerily calm and a murky green. The weather didn't hold for our stay, raining all the way there and sporadically throughout the rest of the trip, but the hazy mist that hung over the bay made the rocks look like they were rising out of thin air, castles in the sky, floating not on water but on drifting gray clouds. It was spooky and very, very cool.

Unfortunately, the haunted look didn't make for great picture taking but I tried my best. You be the judge.

Eating meals surrounded by views like these was surreal. It's moments like those that remind me I'm living one of my dreams.

I wasn't able to get any good photos, but within this valley of water, in the curves and spaces of the limestone, reside little floating villages that seem to be playing a grand, never-ending game of hide and seek with the junks drifting in and out of the thousands of rocks.

Being engulfed in beauty of this magnitude is more than a little overwhelming. Sometimes I had to hold my breath and let it out slowly to regain my equilibrium.

The whole trip was permeated by a calm that seemed to hang in the air, clinging to my skin. I felt like I'd been transported to the most peaceful place on Earth. Remarkably, this feeling wasn't broken by the abundance of booze cruises full of happy drunks laughing loudly and unselfconsciously as they swam at night, jumping from the roof of their junks.

The cave was made up of three different chambers that started small and increased in size. Lit up from below and above by eerie blue, green, red and yellow lights, neat pictures were easier to come by in the cave.

Our guide, Vu, who spoke excellent English, was fond of starting and ending sentences with, "This one," as well as describing things as "nice" or "very nice." He encouraged us to use our imaginations to see things in the walls of the caves. His enthusiasm for this game reminded me of cloud-gazing when I was a kid and being convinced I could see dinosaurs and pop idols in the sky.

In the third chamber, we discovered why the cave was called "Surprising." As we rounded a corner into the chamber the first thing to greet us was this:

Here's a close up for those of you who couldn't make out what was so surprising from the first picture. Vu tried to tell us that many visitors said this rock looked like a cannon and he pointed to a corresponding hole in the ceiling that's placement seemed to corroborate this claim, but we all knew it to be a load of crap. (If I now receive lots of jokes about how your penis is like a cannon, I will never forgive you.) I mean, come on, they had it lit up from beneath with red light.

 

And, lastly, to continue the hilarity of the "Surprising" cave, I came across this shop window on a street in Hanoi:

It was too awesome not to take a picture of it. Apparently, COCK stands for "Creative Oriental Crafts Kingdom," but I like the juxtaposition of this picture with the rock from the cave. It makes me giggle like a schoolgirl.