Vietnam

How long for Halong?
Story by: Wink Dulles. Photos by Vietscape.

"Even if they crated every banana boat and jet ski from Nassau to Nha Trang and stuck them in the bay, there would still be plenty of places to get seriously lost."

A number of seasoned travelers to some of Southeast Asia's formerly most pristine coastal wonders--places like Koh Samui, Koh Phi Phi and Phuket in Thailand; Bali in Indonesia; Nha Trang in Vietnam--probably cringe with each return visit.

If they return at all.

Regrettably, Ha Long Bay, some 165 kilometers northeast of Hanoi and one of the natural wonders of the world, seems destined to follow in their footsteps.

At least at first glance.

A few short years ago, Halong Bay (meaning "Where the Dragon Descends Into the Sea") boasted little more than limestone spires poking out of a teal-painted bay like the scales on Godzilla's back. If you wanted to overnight here, your choices were limited to a couple of grotty government guest houses that could easily pass as underfunded Eastern Bloc hospitals anywhere between East Timor and Vladivostok. Hell, it was the way I liked it. You could wander down to the docks of Bai Chay or Hong Gai and trade a couple of packs of Lucky Strikes to a grizzled skipper and float away on a three hour-voyage aboard a boat that may have formerly seen duty as a Hong Kong coast guard cutter in 1843.

Today, Ha Long Bay is on the map, in the brochures, and on the Web. It even takes American Express. Locals tell me more than 150 hotels have sprouted along the craggy Gulf of Tonkin sister cities of Bai Chay and Hong Gai. I don't count. Don't need to. The camcorder-toting tourists in "Hanoi, Vietnam" T-shirts strolling along the seafront past sidewalk cafes serving mineral water and lattes tell me all I need to know. Ha Long, it seems, is well on its way to becoming another Nha Trang. The only thing missing are the A-Go-Gos. (Which you can probably find if you a-go-go far enough off the Lonely Planet ant trail.)

So I'm somewhat skeptical upon arriving in town for a three-day kayaking trip on the bay. I envision sea-worthy bumper cars and flotillas of sun-burned Euros guzzling beer and doing cannon balls off the top decks of their live-aboard. I see Ha Long Bay becoming the Lake Havasu of East Asia, the only thing left to explore being the ice chest around noon.

But this jaded adventurer has forgotten a thing or two about Ha Long Bay. Namely that it covers 1500 square kilometers, stretching more than a hundred kilometers into the Gulf of Tonkin toward the Chinese border, and encompasses 3000 islands, many reaching heights of 300 meters. Even if they crated every banana boat and jet ski from Nassau to Nha Trang and stuck them in the bay, there would still be plenty of places to get seriously lost. And that's just what I'm hoping to do.

While upscale foreign outfitters have offered kayaking tours to the jet-set for several years, only recently has an upstart adventure tour operator out of Hanoi began offering trips for the rest of us. My guide, Trieu Anh of Buffalo Tours, points out where the jet ski outfitters have opened shop, and where the parasailing operators are staking out parcels of sand.

"What's next, Anh, those silly newlyweds' pedal boats?" I ask, referring to the tacky boats shaped like Donald Duck and Goofy plying the man-made lakes of Dalat.

"Not yet," Anh says matter-of-factly, "But maybe soon."

Marvelous. One thing about Vietnam: Vietnam is the honeymoon capital of Vietnam.

Our expedition is joined by one other guest, Bill Hester, the adventure travel coordinator for North Carolina-based Nantahala Outdoor Center, and his guide Thi, (a.k.a. Mr. T). Bill, who resembles actor Kevin Costner, has the enviable task of scouting the globe's most remote reaches for potential adventure kayaking itineraries. Bill's also one of the sport's foremost guides. As I'd lived in Vietnam for three years writing and updating Fielding's Vietnam, it essentially makes our little expedition a group of four guides. Since there is no one else to actually guide, it makes the ground rules sort of easy: water right here, kayak right there, grotto over there, China way over there. Cocktails at six.

A kilometer offshore, Ha Long's theme-park ambiance is behind us. Sailing junks and longtail canoes replace tourist boats. The distant, towering limestone and dolomite grottoes beckon like Oz.

Ha Long Bay boasts its own version of Bigfoot. Lore says that an enormous beast created the bay and outcroppings as it thrashed its way toward the sea to prevent the forward progress of enemy fleets. For sure, one wrong move, and a vessel is bound to smash into a grotto. (Hell, no wrong moves and you'll likely smash into one anyway.) Two great sea battles were fought here in the 10th and 13th centuries, both probably won by the grottos. Even today, a number of local sailors report sightings of a giant sea beast called Tarasque.

But it isn't Tarasque we're in search of. Simply some solitude, calm waters, dazzling lagoons, unexplored caves, pristine stretches of beach and a couple of kayaks to get us there. That's exactly what we would find.

We spend the first day aboard our eight-meter support vessel, the Hai Au ("Albatross"), in order to get far enough out to sea and deep enough into the extensive grotto network to forget what a fax machine and a Windsor knot look like. We sail past Face Island, Frog Island, a handful of pearl oyster hatcheries and explore the neon-green lagoons tucked inside seemingly inaccessible caves. Three-and-a-half hours, and some 30 kilometers out of Bai Chay, we drop anchor off Ba Cat Beach, known as Cat Van Boi to the locals.

Ba Cat is a powdery white sliver of sand at the base of a sheer limestone edifice soaring 100 meters into the air. Giant ospreys circle overhead, checking out the rare intruders. The last shafts of sunlight dance off the shallow, transparent lagoon that soon recedes, exposing a giant sandbar--a half-kilometer of tiny, infinitesimal tidepools--to the opposite shore. There is only one tide change a day in Ha Long Bay--every 12 hours--so the sea tends to make a spectacle of it. Around the southern point of the craggy, towering islet lies open sea, and a couple of hundred kilometers to Hainan, China.

Bill doffs his trousers and swims the 200 meters to shore from the Hai Au, mumbling something about sharks after getting nudged in the thigh by a creature with gills.

"There are no sharks here," assures Anh. "Never have I seen one in Ha Long Bay."

I recall the recollection of another Vietnamese guide I'd hired on a previous expedition, named Tu, who had been assigned to the US embassy in Saigon shortly before the Tet Offensive in February 1968: "There are no VC here. Never have I seen one in Saigon." A couple of weeks later, he was fumbling with the magazine of his Colt .45 semi-automatic, trying to keep guys in black pajamas out of the embassy kitchen. I opt to wait for a second craft to arrive from nearby Cat Ba Island with our kayaks.

The four of us pitch our tents and kayak back out to the Hai Au as a copper sky silhouetted Ha Long's jagged ridgelines. Our crew seems to be growing. In addition to Bill and I, our two guides, a crew of three (including a diminutive, prepubescent chef named Hoi who could qualify as the F&B manager at Bangkok's Oriental), we're joined by a Vietnamese border policeman, whose job is either to ensure we don't rendezvous with a Scarab stuffed with a cache of smuggled Singaporean VCRs, or try to set out for San Francisco aboard an inner tube. As neither crime seems to be pending, the cop spends his time snoozing while we gorge ourselves on cua hap (steamed crab), muc ran (fried squid), sup khoai tay (potato soup with chopped pork and carrots) and ca sot (fresh snapper marinated in tomato sauce). We wash it all down with multiple frosty cans of Halida beer (Halida beer).

We return to Ba Cat PUI (paddling under the influence), but the only cop between Hong Gai and Cat Ba Island is asleep, and there's not an island in Ha Long Bay where you can walk a straight line even sober. We spend the next couple of hours exploring the tide pools with flashlights. I catch a crab with a snout right out of a Ridley Scott film and suggest we steam it up for breakfast. Appropriately, its Vietnamese name translates into "Monster Face," and Mr. T assures me that I'd end up quite dead by noon if I choose the crab instead of an omelette. The crab's meat is lethal. (I guess I need a guide after all!)

The lagoon again reaches the brim of Ba Cat Beach by sunrise. A few wispy clouds and temperatures hovering around 30 degrees Centigrade promise a scorching hot day. After a breakfast aboard the Hai Au (sans my suggested supplement to the menu), we hop into our kayaks and bid our tender adieu. Anh and Mr. T share a single kayak, while Bill and I are each bestowed our own. We keep the pace light. Sea kayaking isn't blazing down the Deschutes or the Zambesi in class 5 rapids with your heart in your throat. As Bill explains, "In calm-water kayaking, the kayak itself is only a means to get from point A to point B. Sea kayaking is about discovering your surroundings, not your threshold for fear."

And that's precisely how we spend the day, paddling to every nook and cranny the shorelines of the grottos afford. We enter a ribbon-thin dolomite archway, as if we were ghosts, paddling directly into the edifice of the grotto and disappearing. The roof of the cave is no higher than a meter, and we have to lie on our backs to negotiate it. Inside the archway is a magnificent turquoise lagoon, encircled by a natural amphitheater of limestone cliffs, wallpapered with a dense foliage of ficas, mangrove and spiky cacti.

By the time we are under the archway, Mr. T has abandoned ship and is floating on his back in the gin-clear lagoon. I look down into the water and spot a pink jellyfish the size of a hot air balloon, its stringy, frayed tentacles reaching four feet and trailing the monster like the tail of a comet in slow motion. Like a submarine entering an enemy port under the cover of a returning convoy, the creature remains about half a meter deep off my port, keeping pace with my strokes.

"Check this out," I say to Bill, pointing to it with my paddle.

"Check THAT out," Bill counters, pointing to the floating Mr. T--only a dozen meters away.

"Anywhere else in the world," I say, "that's called a Portuguese man-of-war. Don't know what it's called here, but perhaps Mr. T does."

We paddle quickly over to where Mr. T is doing his own version of a jellyfish and inform him of his pending medivac flight to Hanoi.

"There are no jellyfish here," says Anh, who is sittng in the kayak nearby. "Never have I seen one in Ha Long Bay." He'd earlier said the same thing about sharks. Years earlier, Tu had said the same thing about Viet Cong in Saigon.

I stretch my arms to their fullest span and say: "Listen, you guys, the sucker's THIS big!"

Anh and Mr. T laugh. I feel like some fat, sunburned, redneck fisherman in a bar in Bimini after hopping off the charter boat without a minnow to show for it.

Bill and I search for the menace, to no avail. The lagoon is now mined, but, unlike Haiphong of the 1970s, now with creatures of the deep rather than war materiel. "I think we have to assume," Bill announces, "this is the only jellyfish in the South China Sea."

Mr. T remains undaunted by our fish stories. Finally, even Bill sucumbs to Mr. T's blissful, naive bravery and leaps into the water. Figuring a dust-off to Bangkok will set me back at least 10 grand, I stay dry. I'd been stung by those floating breast implants before, and ended up walking around like the Michelin Tire Man for a week.

We lazily make our way back to the rendezvous point with the Hai Au. But not without incident. After paying a visit to a floating hatchery village, about two kilometers from Ba Cat beach, we encounter a couple of locals in pea-green army pith helmets skippering a speed boat powered by a pair of Yamaha outboards. They're about 100 meters off our port when they discover us in a relatively open swath of the bay. They gun the engines and make a bee-line for the kayaks, on a direct collision course at perhaps 30 knots. The speedboat's bow is high off the waterline, the stern spinning up a rooster-tail wake. It seems these boys have every intention of ramming us.

Only when they get to within 10 meters, does the skipper jerk the wheel as the speedboat cuts across our stern. The boat begins circling the kayaks, the two men angrily gesturing at our team and barking orders in Vietnamese to Anh and Mr. T. Though my Vietnamese is limited, it is clear they are asking our two Vietnamese guides if they are Chinese.

I'm thinking pirates. They look the part. The boat looks the part. And, remember, I know for a fact that the only cop between Hong Gai and Cat Ba Island is asleep. And unarmed. The perfect place to jack up a couple of white boys.

Calmly, Anh pulls his kayak alongside mine and points to a distant channel marker, perhaps a klick away. "That's where the Hai Au is to meet us. I want you and Bill to paddle to that marker. RIGHT NOW. And don't look back."

Bill and I paddle steadily, forcefully, but not as if in a rush to get any place. There is no panic. The 80 horses on the bad guys' boat will allow them to catch us with even a week head start, and the Hai Au is nowhere in sight, anyway. Which is fine by me. If we're going to get popped by pirates, better it be in the kayaks than aboard the Hai Au. In my kayak, I'm humping half a pack of Marlboro Lights, two rolls of Fuji 200 ASA film, and a $40 Taiwanese instant camera. Aboard the Hai Au is most everything that finances my life in Asia, including the passport that got me here and, admittedly, a pretty cool pair of Thai Army Ranger boots.

Finally, the speed boat leaves the scene, fortunately in the direction from which it came. Bill and I are now hundreds of meters in front of Anh and Mr. T. We pull into a cave on a small grotto protected by a perimeter of transparent, gently lapping waves to wait. Bill christens the island, "Wink's Relief".

The Hai Au finally shows and Hoi wastes no time preparing a marvelous lunch of steamed crab, french-fried potatoes, fried water spinach and cahn bi (green pumpkin soup)--as if getting chased down in the Gulf of Tonkin by nasty-looking dudes in NVA headgear and Mad Max Chris Crafts is part of the package. Bill and I never really find out who the local gangstas are. "Protecting their area," is all Anh offers.

It's good enough for me. He and Thi had done their jobs. They'd put their clients first. Their post-lunch siesta aboard the Hai Au is well deserved and gives Bill and I the opportunity to do a little solo wandering among the fringe islets. On one, we find a small, virtually hidden cave entrance among the outcroppings. Tying up our kayaks and spelunking deeper and deeper into the cave, it soon becomes apparent that we are perhaps the first people ever to explore this particular cavern. Some of the passages are virtually impossible to traverse, the footing unseen and treacherous. The only light source are pin-sized holes in the roof of the chamber, perhaps 30 meters above us.

After 15 minutes, we emerge in a mangrove-ringed cove on the opposite side of the islet. Bill and I look at each other. We're thinking the same thing: climb to the summit of the grotto, locate the kayaks, and do an Acapulco-style swan dive off a sheer edifice into the bay to be reunited with our vessels.

This is simply too much fun.

The script plays out, though the swan dives would have earned us a 2 by the East German judges.

Exhausted, we tie the kayaks up to the Hai Au for the two-kilometer trip to Nam Cat Beach, even more spectacular than the strip of sand at Ba Cat. A tidy Mahayana Buddhist grave site directly behind the beach is testimony to the fact that one man or woman has chosen this remote spot as the most beautiful corner of the planet to forever rest.

Our rest is not as long. After setting up camp on the baby powder-like sand, we paddle out to the Hai Au and gorge ourselves on what Hoi has pulled from the sea this day and mixed with a little nuoc mam (fish sauce) and a lot of culinary creativity.

The next morning, shortly after sunrise and a deep slumber beside the creeping tide at Nam Cat, we paddle back to the Hai Au. Anh and I are to paddle the two kilometers over to Cat Ba Island where we'll catch a ferry to Haiphong, then return to Hanoi. Bill still has a couple of days left on his wilderness itinerary. He's obviously already decided that Ha Long Bay will become a package in the Nantahala Outdoor Center brochures, so the next two days are his own. You can see it in his smile. Bill and Mr. T board their kayaks, wave and push off from the Hai Au. They don't look back.

Before long, they disappear from sight. I have no idea where they're headed. Something I couldn't imagine myself considering only two days before, surrounded by wannabe banana-boaters and chewing gum hawkers on the docks of Bai Chay. Perhaps they'll find Tarasque - or more likely the only jellyfish in the South China Sea.

(For more information on Ha Long Bay, see our Ha Long Bay destination).

Note: Sadly pictures from Wink Dulles are unavailable as Wink capsized his kayak on the return leg of the journey and his camera now lies somewhere on the bottom of Halong Bay! We're inserting the pictures in this article from the folks at Vietscape.

About the Author

Wink Dulles is the author or co-author of eight guidebooks for Fielding Worldwide, including Fielding's Vietnam (Including Laos & Cambodia), Fielding's Thailand, Southern Vietnam on 2 Wheels, and the best-seller The World's Most Dangerous Places. His exploits have been featured in Outside Magazine and TIME Magazine, and he has appeared numerous times on CNN news and feature broadcasts as an analyst on Southeast Asian affairs. His own articles have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Escape, Business Traveller, The Chicago Tribune, New York Newsday, the Detroit Free Press, Adventure Journal and numerous other major dailies and magazines. He currently pens a regular column for the Toronto Sun, Action Asia and Trips Magazine. Dulles personally arranged the extraction of ABC Nightline anchor Ted Koppel from war-torn Cambodia in 1997 and guided the first American motorcycle tour of Vietnam in 1996. He is also a co-host of the upcoming Discovery Channel series, "The World's Most Dangerous Places," based on the book Robert Young Pelton and Dulles co-wrote. Dulles lives on his northeastern Thailand ranch.

This article is posted from Vietnam Adventures.