I had a great sleep last night. I went to sleep after reading probably around 10:30pm and woke up at 6am! When we were talking about Tai Chi at 6:30am yesterday Mom said "do you think it's light here at 6:30am?" When I woke up Mom turned over so I knew she was awake and I said "Well, I guess that answers the question if it's light out at 6am!" It was bright and sunny - as Jay would say "a bluebird day". We did not go to Tai Chi. We did, however, go for breakfast when it opened at 7:30am.
Breakfast was a mix of traditional vietnamese and what I would consider our breakfast items (bacon, eggs, hashbrowns). I had mostly traditional breakfast items but did have a croissant after.
The coffee was AMAZING! It's got a real chocolate undertone, it was delicious. I can't drink a lot of caffeine and I had 2 cups! So good, I can't wait to have some tomorrow morning.
After breakfast we had about 45 mins before we had to be ready for the excursion today which is a transfer to a smaller day-tour ship for a trip to a cave and a fishing village. I got to use my new bag today! I don't like to spend money on 'stuff' especially for me - so of course as I unpacked it this morning I was thinking that this takes the per use cost to $220 so I just have to use it 100 more times to make it worth it - which means I'll spend $50,000+ on vacations before I get my moneys worth out of this bag, lol.
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I forgot to mention yesterday that while we were on the row boat there was a Spanish couple who got separated so one was sitting beside me and her husband was sitting behind Mom and beside Annette from our group. The Spanish couple was not happy with Annette who was chatting to the couple behind her - the things this woman was writing..I only know a little Spanish and it was RUDE. Anyway today they're on our excursion - it's just them and our Uniworld group of 12. Cheryl and Steve from Connecticut, Annette and Vincente from Florida, Mary and David from Nashville, Suzie and Chris and Jo and Conrad from Oakville and me and Mom. Vincente is Spanish but has been in the US for 21 years so Annette knows more spanish than the average person and she commented that she had seen what she was writing about them - I can't believe the restraint she had. I would have said at some point "you know that we can understand spanish" and let them feel awful.
We took a tender to Titov island again, it was about 9am and there was no one there except our waiting ship. I asked Hieu if it was closed today but he said no it just hadn't opened yet.
When we got on the ship he did a quick briefing and Conrad walked in as Hieu was telling us where the Happy Room (the bathroom) is. Conrad said "Oh, what's the happy room?!" with so much enthusiasm that everyone started laughing. I said "It's not that kind of trip Conrad" and Chris said "I'll be back in 6 minutes", lol.
I went to take another selfie and Mom said "another one?" lol. this is her "another one" face. I said she'll be thankful for the memories, haha, maybe not the memory of that face.
We were talking about how we've had such spectacular weather. I decided to look up Ho Chi Minh City weather to see if we'd get lucky and it had turned. Nope. Glad we have the raincoat and umbrella and waterproof shoes for the next part of the tour.
We have about an hour before we get to the cave stop so Hieu gave us a lot more good information on the Ha Long Bay area. I'll intersperse photos to keep it interesting, there is a lot of info and even more photos.
There are approx 400 boats on the bay, about 200 capable of hosting overnight guests and 200 day trip vessels. The Government now controls the number of boats and if you want to get a new boat you have to get rid of an existing boat of the same capacity. If you want to get a bigger boat you'd have to have several smaller boats to equal the capacity of the new boat.
300-500M years ago the Ha Long area was created by tectonic shifts while the caves were formed by collapse. Plants grow because the limestone has nutrients and there is still some soil.
The 1969 islands mentioned yesterday are in the area recognized by UNESCO but there are over 3000 islands in total.
The depth is surprisingly shallow. Where we were achored is an average of 5-30m deep. The deepest area is 50m.
Between high and low tide there is about a 4.5m difference. One tide a day which is unique to Ha Long Bay and one other place in the world - everywhere else have 2 tides a day.
Monsoon season is between May-Sept but June-early September is most common. This year it’s hotter than normal seasonally and they've had fewer typhoons than normal.
Local legend - Ha Long is “descending dragon” - wooden ship of invaders came and the locals prayed for assistance. A dragon appeared and dropped pearls into the bay which created the islands and the ships couldn’t stop and crashed into the islands. Now, you might remember from yesterday that Ha Noi means "inside river" so I asked how Ha and Ha have two different meanings. They're written with different accents and spoken with different tones. For example he said Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma which sounded, to everyone, the same but mean Ma (ghost) Ma (mother) Ma (the grave) Ma (the horse) Ma (baby rice plant) Ma (which is something) - each is written with a different accent as well.
In Vietnam there are 4 sacred animals - the Pheonix (grace and virtue), unicorn (justice and wisdom), turtle (longevity and health), dragon (power and prosperity)
There were 7 villages built on bamboo and styrofoam on the Bay. In 2014 the government moved most of the villagers to the mainland with a school and hospital to try to stop pollution - everything was discharged and the styrofoam and bamboo would break apart in storms and cause debris to float in the water. There was no financial incentive other than the education and shelter. There are now 3 water villages and they have about 100 living in them each where they used to be 200-300 per village. They live on the water year round fishing every day and living between their boat and a hut on a raft.
Of the 102M people about 50% are still farmers/villagers. In 2000 it would have been about 80% and is continually declining.
Yesterday Mom and I were trying to figure out what this place was and assumed it was a boutique hotel - it was a museum built and opened by a private company but the Government closed it because they were selling tickets. Government also closed this tourist stop (speed boats and kayaks) which is now abandoned.
We arrived at our cave stop and Hieu handed the Guide role over to Harry who told us the translation for this is Fairy Cave. It ws found in 1938 by Anderson, a Swedish archeologist. Specimens have been collected of teeth and bones which have been dated to 8,000-10,000 years old "evidence that my great great great great great great great grandparents enjoyed dating and bbqing in the caves"
The floor off the path is littered with fresh water mollusk shells because the cave was under the sea when it was formed before it got pushed out of the water.
Harry then took us to the map and showed us a series of places we have been so far, where we are now and where we will go tomorrow. He said this cave would be considered a baby monkey where tomorrow is like King Kong size.
Where the ship is moored for the night:
Where we are now:
Where the fishing village is:
The 3 main bays, Ha Long being one of them cover 1950 sq km, the red line is the UNESCO recognized are which is approx 400 sq km. You can not live on the islands, there is no climbing and no scuba diving but you can live on the water. Ha Long Bay has been voted one of the 7 New Natural Wonders of the World.
These are 8000-10000 year old bones and teeth collected from the cave - and then someone wrote on them with a fine tipped pen, lol.
This barge is used to load and unload ships, but it's in the middle of the series of islands in the middle of no where so I'm not sure how that works - there is coal mining under the mountains which we thought maybe this was used for, this is the largest mining area in Vietnam (which is surprising considering the UNESCO designation).
We got to the fishing village, grabbed our life jackets and were waiting under a covered area. I asked Hieu if it was worth going on the row boat - he asked if we kayaked. Mom can't kayak because of her bad shoulder so I said no and he said "kayak is better, you can get up close, but rowing is ok". I told everyone else and they all went kayaking which worked out well for us because then Hieu went and got us umbrellas for shade while we were out there and we had the whole boat to ourselves because they all went kayaking, lol.
As we were waiting Hieu counted and said "are we missing someone?" we all looked around and then looked back at the ship and said "Suzie is coming, she went to the washroom" as she promptly ran into the glass sliding door with everyone looking at her (because we were looking for her literally the entire group was watching her). She came down and said "I do that all the time".
Every village has a Temple and a Pagoda for Buddhism. On the 1st and 15th of every lunar month the villagers go to temple to pray for good fortune. It has nothing to do with religion, it's more of a tradition.
The water village is made up of homes and floating shops. The concrete boats are fresh water supply and they go to get fresh water and bring it back to the village.
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| The Concrete Ship |
Where the villages used to float on styrofoam and bamboo now they use air barrels for floating.
We had a nice row around for approx 30 mins then came back to the ship for lunch.
We sat with Mary and Dave for lunch today on the ship. They've done a lot of travelling and a few other cruises with Uniworld in the past. We were talking about which were their favourite places and where in the world they've been. It was a lovely lunch with them and this is what we ate:
After lunch the ship left the village and headed back to our bigger ship, the Paradise Legacy, just under an hour. We went back up to the top deck and it was shady but hardly any breeze while we were in the protected area and then the breeze picked up as we got closer to the ship. We got back just before 2pm and got changed (because it's hot so you do need to do a top down change even though we didn't do too much) and I came up to the 2nd deck to work on the blog while Mom read and then had a nap. She did not have as fitful a sleep as I did last night so she's tired.
It's 3:30pm now and I've just finished up writing up until now so I think that I'll go down to the room and see how Mom is making out - I've probably been up here a little more than an hour. Suzie just came up and is heading to the pool on the top deck. She has a slight accent so I asked here where she is originally from and she is from Hungary, Budapest but moved to Canada when she was 20. If Mom is sleeping then I'll probably join her at the pool. Her husband, Chris, is also taking a nap. As we were talking Cheryl and Steve came down from the pool (judging by their attire and towels) so I asked how it was and they both said it was nice, not totally refreshing but cool enough that it was nice to get in. I think I'll head down to change and then up to the pool - we have nothing this afternoon until Happy Hour at 5:30pm and dinner at 7:00pm.
At 5:20 we went up for happy hour. Even though we had lunch later I was hungry - we had a lot of food but not big portions of each. So we shared our favourite vacation snack, peanuts and beer. We tried 2 local beer, I preferred the Ha Noi beer over the Siagon one.
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We sat talking with Steve and Cheryl for a while before Conrad and Jo came up and joined us. We had a whole conversation about their temperature in the room. I asked what it was set at because he was complaining it was an icebox and he said 18. 18?! Ours is set to 24! He looked at Cheryl and was like “see?!”. About 6:30pm we went back down to the room to grab a long sleeve shirt and Mom and I got talking about how there used to be an app to use with Blogger but years ago it stopped working. Now I log into Blogger with Google, so I'm guessing they bought out the app at some point so I wondered if the app worked again so downloaded it and it does! It makes it so much easier to upload photos because, especially when wifi isn't strong, it's hard to always have enough signal for my photos to sync with my laptop - which is where I write the blog.
On the way down to the room we had seen Hieu as I was groaning coming down the stairs - my quads are sore from the 400 steps up to the observation tower and I said "tomorrow will be even worse, day 2 after the exercise". So anyway, he came to the table to let everyone know it's about 800 steps tomorrow and I read online that it's a one way trip so once you start you can't stop - so I think that we'll likely skip that one tomorrow. I looked it up and it looks very commercial (lots of multi colour flood lights and 1000 people at a time capacity.
At 7:00pm we headed up for dinner. Right after eating lunch we had to decide what we wanted, right when you're stuffed full of food.
I opted for a salad, no soup, the pork tenderloin entree with saffron and mustard sauce (I didn't eat the rice) and a lava cake (which was in a sake glass) with icecream (that is not a trick of perspective, the ice cream is bigger than the cake!)
OMG and then the Cruise Manager came to the table and said "May we interrupt for a moment", yes of course - oh he has a certificate, I wonder what that's for - maybe Annette and Vincente's anniversary? Oh no, it's because I went yesterday to the cooking demonstration for how to make a dumpling. FFS.
It's just after 10pm now, just doing a final check through the blog and heading to bed.
