Halong Bay

Halong means ‘descending dragon’ and the legend has it that the bay was made as the dragon careered into the sea and thrashed it’s tail around, cutting the bay from the magnificent limestone rocks that pepper this area. Another explanation is that when the glaciers melted at the end of the last ice age, the sea level rose and hills became islands. Which doesn’t explain why the islands didn’t return to their former hill status when the water levels receded…so that really only leaves the explanation that the amazing rocky island scenery here is caused by millions of years of water erosion on the limestone. Whatever the reason for these beautiful craggy rocks scattered over the entire bay, it’s all very James Bond.

A four-hour bus journey takes us to our wooden junk, The Lagoon Explorer II. With only 4 bedrooms on board, we’re joined by two other couples. Alex and Cat, a couple of Peckham residing solicitors plus Siva and Preema, Melbourne dwelling accountant and banker respectively. OK, I’d rather have shared with a rock star, a porn star, Cameron Diaz and Angelina Jolie, but hey, they were nice enough. The boat itself is gorgeous and much of an improvement on the 18-bedroom junk Will had originally booked. For the next 24 hours, we seemed to do an awful lot of eating (and drinking, of course). Seven course lunch, ten course dinner, three course breakfast….phew. But the food was amazing, especially when you consider it was knocked up on the back of a moving boat in a 4ft x 4ft “kitchen”. There was a busy schedule to stick to; drinks, lunch, visit the floating villages, visit a cave, see the monkeys, climb 420 steps to see the view (we declined, not wanting to hold up the party with a slightly sickly Harley), visit the beach, drinks, dinner, drinks….next morning we were up for a 6.30am swim off the boat, breakfast, then a climb to huge cave complete with glowing pink penis stalactite/mite (I think this one may have gone up as well as down…), a swim, more drinks, lunch…and a bill for £75 for our drinks. They had omitted to tell us that the prices of the drinks didn’t include 10% tax and 5% service, so the wine wasn’t quite as cheap as we’d thought.

The bad thing about this beautiful place is that all the junks have to moor up in one spot for the night for safety reasons (which frankly is a bit of a surprise given the distinct lack of anything remotely safety-conscious here) which somewhat ruins the idyllic peacefulness once the boats engine cuts out. We counted almost 50 other junks moored up overnight in a pretty small area. Come morning when the junks are leaving, the sea is littered with plastic bags, polystyrene, empty bottles…Another UNESCO World Heritage Site, I can only hope that there is a curb on the number of junks allowed to visit per day before it’s ruined by thoughtless tourists, too lazy to throw their rubbish into a bin. I bet it was those yobs on the 18-bedroom junk…