Cruising Halong Bay

After a long flight from JFK (via Seoul) to Hanoi, we arrived at our hotel around 11PM.  The next morning, a van picked us up bright and early for the four hour drive to Halong Bay.

Unfortunately, there was standstill traffic on the main road, so our driver took us on a crazy detour through some small villages and some backroads clearly not designed for heavy two-way traffic:

We finally arrived at Halong Bay, and boarded a boat from Indochina Sails:

(Note: Not our boat, but another boat of the same company; ours was larger with a fourth level.)

On the first afternoon, our boat took us to a floating fishing village of people who live and work on the water.  It was sad to see how hard their lives are.  It felt a little  intrusive being paddled around their homes, but tourism of their village is now a big source of income for the residents.

The boat does both one-night and two-night tours, with the vast majority doing only one night.  People who stay for a second night transfer to a day boat while the boat goes back to shore.  We ended up on a huge day boat with only one other couple, two honeymooners from New York.  There were more staff than guests on the boat — we were very spoiled with practically a private tour!

From the day boat, we visited an enormous cave, kayaked around the bay, swam off the boat, and visited a pearl farm:

The cave is called "Surprise Cave" because the small entrance leads to a series of huge caverns. 

The scenery was incredible and, thankfully, we had amazing weather for the entire sail:

Sunrise from our balcony

 On our final morning on the boat, we docked at Titop Island and climbed 437 steps to the top of the island for a panoramic view of Halong Bay:

After that, we headed back to Hanoi -- and thankfully had no traffic on the way back.  It was an amazing start to what's already been a fantastic vacation.

We're just finishing up in Hanoi now and will post about our time in Hanoi soon!