Halong Bay is one of the must-see places in Vietnam. But the problem it shares with most must-see places, is that it's absolutely chock-a-block with other people who've been told they must see it. Which can spoil the experience somewhat.

When I arrived at Halong Bay after four hours squashed in a seat above the rear wheel arch of a tiny minibus (less than an hour after getting off my 14-hour almost sleepless journey from Hue if you remember) the first sight was of dozens and dozens of tourist boats packed together, waiting to take the latest payload of tourists for a "trip of a lifetime" around the bay:

The three-day, two-night Halong Bay experience is pretty standard across the various operators. You get to visit a famous cave, do some sea kayaking, see "Monkey Island" (and who wouldn't go on the strength of that alone?), see a local "minority" village, and stay for a night on CatBa Island, the biggest island in the bay. The two-day, one-night experience misses out the village visit, Monkey Island (big mistake) and the stay on CatBa island.

My assigned group was a mixture of ages and nationalities, much like the world imagined by Michael Jackson in his hit "Heal The World". We were served a fairly mediocre lunch on board our boat and learnt that our "all inclusive" price did not actually include any drinking water. Tired and already suspecting that the trip wasn't going quite going to live up to the hype I tried to engage our guide in a conversation about how it was not unreasonable to assume that an all-inclusive trip would provide one of the basic elements required to sustain human life. All to no avail.

Anyway, first stop was the famous caves. Our guide made a great show of the fact that the caves are listed not once, but twice, as a World Heritage site. Now there's no question that it's an impressive set of caves, but over the last few months I've seen more places that claim to be World Heritage sites than I could shake a copy of the Lonely Planet at. I'm not saying that the site selection panel aren't that discerning, but put it this way: I had a new kitchen and bathroom put in last year and I've just heard it's one of the front-runners for selection in 2007.

The caves were absolutely packed full of tourists and it ages to get through the tastefully-lit interior. Lots of people with video cameras videoing the caves. I've never understood why people bother videoing completely stationery things. Get a stills camera. They're really good for things that stay still.

Here's a still picture of me with the wholly stationery caves in the background:


And here are all the boats waiting to take their consignment of tourists to the next stop on the Halong Bay merry-go-round:
Back on the boat we chugged our way back out into the bay (the junk-style sails are sadly just for show) and dropped anchor.

As an admittedly rather petty protest against the attempt to extort further monies from us for bottled drinking water, I led the charge to buy water from the floating corner shop that drifted up to our boat rather than line the pockets of the evil boat owner:

When the crew spotted the little black market that had appeared on one side of the boat they started shouting something at the woman in the boat. One of the tourists in our group spoke Vietnamese and translated it roughly as: "Piss off or we'll shove a sharp stick in a very private area."

After dinner we succumbed to the boat owners impressive understanding of the needs of a group of captive Westerners and proceeded to empty the coolbox of over-priced beers. The buzz off the alcohol had to compete with the rather queasy high produced by the clouds of fumes given off by the boat's generator but we retired to our cabins in better spirits and with high hopes for the next day.