| Cat Ba Island and Ha Long Bay |
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| Cat Ba Island and Ha Long Bay |
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Cat Ba Island
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Our guide book described Cat Ba as the best kept secret of Vietnam - until a few years ago. It used to be a quiet fishing village with just some odd tourists. Now, Cat Ba now has a boulevard, several hotels, and lots of restaurants and souvenir shops. |
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But the best part of Cat Ba is not on the land, but in the water. You can take a boat for a trip through the bay. Here are dozens or maybe hundreds of floating houses, clustered together in neat streets. |
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Although the guard dog looks very menacing, the people enjoyed seeing tourists and wave and smile while repairing the fishing nets or transporting people or cargo from one house to the other.
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Cat Ba National Park
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| A part of Cat Ba island is declared National Park. We were brought to the beginning of the park, walked through it and were picked up by a boat at the other side and brought back to our hotel. In between we crossed a couple of small but steep mountains, enjoyed a cup of tea in the middle of the jungle and had lunch in the little village in the National Park. |
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Ha Long Bay
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Ha Long Bay is placed on the World Heritage list of Unesco, and with reason. There are thousands of little islands scattered throughout the bay. As they are of limestone, the water has nibbled a bit of the rock at the waterline. For some of the smaller rocks this gives the impression the rock may fall down sometime soon! After some hours of sailing, we visited a cave with beautiful stalagmites, illuminated with bright colours. A nice surprise of Vietnam is that you should not recognize an Indian or elephant, but a dragon and a lion. Still, we don't have enough imagination for this. |
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| Back on the boat we found the reason why we didn't recognize the dragon. The small lobster on the right is called the Ha Long dragon, and he doesn't look a bit like the dragon we expected. But he tasted fine. And we also bought some of the other Ha Long treasures: pearls that are grown here. |
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