Notes from Joe: Ha Long

Wow that bus ride was horrible!

We almost hit a truck or should I say the truck almost hit us. Not really sure who would be at fault since neither vehicle slowed down and both were over the middle line, which really means nothing here. It's actually a common occurrence for vehicles to have near misses in this country. It's like everyone is playing a giant game of chicken. Sophie's dad explained to me that the people think it is lucky to come so close to an accident but not actually have one. This was just after our boat passed very close to another boat in the bay.

So Ha long is a quickly growing resort type town in the north. The bay is awesome. If you want to see some pictures you can easily find them online. This computer is slow or else I would have included a link. After arriving in town our tour guide took us on a boat. Our group was not even ten and the boat had lots of room for walking about. In the pictures you will probably see the type of boat we rode. The boat people are very nice. Most of them are owner operators and actually live on the boats.

We took a 3 hour tour, a three hour tour. The bay is full of islands (you should really look at some pics to see what I am talking about). We stopped for lunch at a floating fish store where you can choose your lunch. And then the boat owner cooks what you buy. They actually prepared a lunch for us and we bought extra. In addition to a traditional lunch we had clams fresh out of the bay. The were really salty and Sophie found 6 pearls in one! They were small but I kept them anyway, a great souvenir. After lunch we kept moving through the islands and the tour guide got really excited about the "fighting cock" rock formation. We took a bunch of pics. Then we stopped for a cave tour. On one of the larger islands a cave was discovered in 1993. I'm not sure why it took so long for them to find it but it was huge. Maybe three times the size of Indian Echo. We took more pics. After the cave we headed back to the dock and the mood on the boat was relaxed. The owners were playing cards and had invited other boat people on for a game. It was great to see the culture of this place and get away from the traffic and noise of the city.

Oh yeah, I saw a monkey! A real monkey, not in a cage or anything. I'm not sure how the monkeys got on the islands but they are there. The tour guide said in the summer the monkeys come into the cave (where it is cool). The monkeys knew about the cave long before the people. I would have liked to have seen more but I think they know to stay away from people, or else they might get eaten.

Tomorrow we head back to Hanoi in the afternoon and will take an overnight train to Sapa, a religious locale where trekking is a very popular tourist activity. Since I won't be around a computer for several days you won't hear from us, so don't worry we are doing well. The food has been good although at the stop during the bus ride dad made us eat some questionable food. I only ate the hot soup, hopefully it won't come back to haunt me. I have a feeling accommodations will be less than luxurious in Sapa.

I'm going to end my message here but, if you want you can keep reading Mom. No really stop reading now. Everything is fine. If you really want to hear about the Vietnamese you can continue but I strongly urge you not to.

I'll write back in a few days if we come across another internet cafe.

Joe and Sophie








Alright so now that Mom is gone...

On the bus ride down we kept seeing signs for dog. Not like to buy puppies. You can eat dog meat if you want. They even make Dog Pho (noodle soup). I haven't seen many dogs here until today. But as we traveled out of the city limits most people had some dogs running around. Mostly mutts but we saw some great looking German Shepards. I'm not sure if they prefer one kind of dog over another but most of the dogs were of medium build with lots of muscle. I have heard the meat is sweet but I really don't care to eat it and I feel awful every time I see a dog now. Today on the fish market boat they had 4 dogs in a small crate. I'm going to assume they were for meat.