Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Discovery Travel and Living - Halong Bay

My family came to visit me in May and that kept my pretty busy for a while. Before the trip, I was discussing with M where I should bring them to shop, eat, sightsee, etc. Had to take into consideration various VIPs like my heat-averse dad, my shopping crazy brother, etc. :) The high point for me was our family trip to Halong Bay. Located 3 hours drive away from Hanoi, Halong Bay (or "Bay of the Descending Dragon") is located in the Gulf of Tonkin. It consists of a series of limestone caves rising from the sea and is quite a spectacular sight. Several islands along the bay contain enormous caves, open to visitors, with interesting-looking stalactites and stalagmites.

We started our journey to Halong at 9am in the morning and arrived at 1pm. After a fairly tedious climb to our junk (believe it or not, we had to jump over a few junks before reaching ours!), our cruise along Halong Bay began.

I was told that the scenery in Guilin is similar to Halong but ten times more majestic.

But this is already gorgeous to me!

Lunch was a sumptuous seafood meal served on board. We even stopped by one of the small "kelongs" and bought fresh clams. As expected, we were "cheated" by the locals who sold us the clams at SGD 10/kg. But the end product served on the table was yummy!

See the kelong here? They are tourist traps and not patronised by the locals.

After lunch, we went for our tour at 2 caves to view the stalactites and staglamites. The first one which we went to was the "Heavenly Grotto". I realised a fair bit of imagination is required before you can understand why the locals are so proud of the "natural sights". But I do agree that some of the figures look fairly real.

Can you guess what this figure is?

And what about this? :)

After the visit, we went to our hotel for a short rest before dinner. As I am not a seafood fan, I was disappointed to find seafood being served again! Grudgingly, I ate fairly little and quickly. The activity after dinner was a visit to the night market near our hotel. It was fairly big and we had fun walking around, browsing through some of the items. My mum bought a few bags from a young Vietnamese girl who spoke fluent Mandarin (gasps!) and I couldn't help but buy a cute little giraffe carving for VND 10,000 (SGD 1.00).

The next morning, we had a quick lunch (it was seafood again!! but we managed to convince the tour guide to serve some tofu and veggies) before making our way to Bat Trang, a ceramics village near Hanoi. We stepped into one of the biggest stores to visit the show room and their workshop to understand more about the ceramics making process.

The designs on the ceramics are drawn by hand, with one looking exactly the same as the other!

A layer of "special varnish" is coated over the near-end products to provide the shiny look before the ceramics are heated at high temperatures.

The pretty pieces at the showroom were too tempting for my mum who bought a few pieces as "keepsake". From Bat Trang, we headed back to Hanoi and officially concluded our 2 days 1 night tour to Halong Bay. It was quite a relief for me as I could finally be spared from the seafood torture. :p

Would I go back to Halong again? Well, my answer is "yes" though this time I would like to experience staying in a junk overnight instead of a hotel. Imagine staring up the starry sky in the middle of the night... Doesn't it sound good?