Three years ago I sat at the nurse’s station of the infectious disease unit at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the eighth floor of the tower building of the hospital, thus it was referred to as Tower 8. It was about 4:00 AM, it was a rare time, free from chaos. It was quiet. I drank the last of my Monster Energy drink and stared at the computer screen. I was tired, unhappy, and I hated my job, Tower 8 was not great.
I decided to pick places in the world to visit once I escaped from the Tower Eight stress-hole. In a few months I’d have a year’s experience and I’d be able to leave for a better nursing job.
I also needed to save money so I could travel around the world within a couple years time. I figured I’d visit Vietnam, so I googled “places to see in Vietnam.” Google produced pictures of Halong Bay.
I was enamored by the images of the limestone islands and towering karsts scattered throughout the bay. I looked at the Vietnamese fishing boats, the water, the colors, the otherworldliness. It looked like a location that should be chosen to represent a planet in a Star Wars movie.
I dreamed of someday reaching this place, feeling the water, and smelling the air. A few days ago this dream came true.
I splurged on a two-day, one night tour that was popular in many of the hostels. I chose the Cocktail Cruise. I could have chosen the Castaway Cruise, but that was more of a booze cruise, lots of drinking, and more drinking. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted majestic adventure.
The Cocktail Cruise consisted of a day cruise through the bay with stops for kayaking and swimming. In the evening the boat drops you at a private island resort and that evening you and your tour mates eat, drink, and be merry. The next morning you travel to Catba Island National Park for a hike to an observation point. This sounded like the tour for me.
The mini-van picked us up from the hostel at 08:00 AM. We had a two and a half hour ride to the boat ahead of us. The tour guide introduced herself as Flower because that’s what her name means in Vietnamese. She smiled a lot and her cadence, like so many English speaking Vietnamese, had an odd rhythm. She paused in unexpected places and put emphasis on seemingly random words. It was like listening to a bad actor play happy during a cold reading of a dramatic movie script. Regardless, her pleasant nature was charming.
I got to know the people sitting around me on the Mini-van. There were the two young German sisters (whose names I’ve forgotten), the young guy with an awesome job of leading bicycling tours all over the world for a company called Back Roads (I was a bit envious of his job, and forgot his name already as well. But I remember he was from Virginia), The woman from the Netherlands with three kidneys (She’d gotten a kidney transplant last year. The kidney was from her mom. In Europe they leave the bad kidneys in and reroute them to blood vessels in the upper leg. Her mother named the kidney Cliff.), and the young woman from Sweden who was five years into becoming a doctor.
We passed a lot of cemeteries along the highway. It’s funny, looking at the differences in the way we bury our dead.
We arrived at the dock and boarded the boat. Flower, once again, went through our itinerary, smiling at the end of each section of her little speech. She used a stick to point out on a wall map where we’d be traveling. Then we went to the second and third story of the boat and watched the sites as we had a few beers and listened to music.
They fed us a family style lunch on the boat. They started with an appetizer of French Fries. I hadn’t had a French Fry in over two months, so even though they were the frozen kind that came in a bag, I enjoyed them greatly.
We took in some more sights before arriving at a floating fisherman’s dock. It was here that we got into two person kayaks and went on an hour or so trip in the bay.
.... I’ll tell you all about in part two!
!steemitworldmap 20.9760 lat 107.0500 long Halong Bay part one, Vietnam, d3scr