Halong Bay

Halong Bay, (North) Vietnam December 31-January 1, 2006

We were met by our private tour driver and our tour guide right off our boat. The tour guide, Cuc, spoke English perfectly. We got in the car and drove down to the harbor area. Then we got on a ferry. The ferry was something else. We were walking among motorcycles to get on it. These motorcycles in this country are nuts. People carry their babies on them, produce, furniture, everything. Many of them have 4 people on them! Anyways, our car didn’t make it on the same ferry as us, or the next one, or the next one. Apparently military cars get on first, then government, and then private cars. So we had to wait on the other side for a while. They’re building a beautiful new suspension bridge over the bay. It’s almost complete. The Japanese are paying for it because it will help them with exporting stuff from Vietnam and China. That will help a tremendous amount because the ferry is the only way across now and you can wait forever to get across. If you come from the Chinese border (which many do since it’s so close), you can wait 2 days for a ferry! Luckily our driver was only about 20 minutes or so behind us. We drove past a prison that the French built and kept Vietnamese communists in. Only part of it remains. People have houses built into the cliffs on top of it. Kind of interesting. We told our guide to skip the Pagoda (temple). We went to the market. This market, unlike some of the others, was for the locals to shop in. It is funny to see all the fake merchandise. Everything is fake. And it’s not all spelled right.

Cuc was really informative about everything. She lead us out the back of the market, where all the boats were jammed in and people were selling fish. It was smelly and dirty and very busy back there. She took us to the water’s edge. A group of people were looking at Brant’s head and one guy even went up and touched it. They think his head is beautiful here and everyone seems fascinated with it! It’s pretty funny. Then, the next thing you know, she asked us if we wanted to take this row boat around the bay. It was $2 for an hour for this woman to row us around in a tiny bamboo boat. We said we would, and had to climb over cables and steps and all kinds of things to get on this thing. It was pretty interesting getting out of there too. Then this lady rowed us all over the place. Cuc pointed all sorts of things out. These ladies have these tiny bamboo boats and they shuttle people and merchandise from big boats to the market and back. We saw one tiny lady carrying 2 jugs full of oil. They were as big as she was, but she carried them from the market down to her tiny boat and started paddling out! Our boat-lady was nice. She had the traditional hat on like almost all the Vietnamese people wear, man or woman. She rowed us all over the place. We went past these houses. The people keep dogs on their house and raise fish under the house. They raise Grouper. They don’t eat it, though, it’s too expensive. It all gets exported to Japan. Cuc was talking to the boat lady. You should have heard them, they both talk at once continuously. I don’t know how they hear what the other is saying. Apparently they were looking for a good house to stop at to show us… one where the dogs didn’t look at mean. The people on the house boats keep dogs for protection. Those are different types of dogs than the ones they eat. The ones they eat are these very short little dogs. The European dogs are for pets and as guard dogs, and are not eaten. We never ate dog while we were there (that we know of). But it is pretty common. They pulled up to this house boat. This guy had 4 dogs, but he had them under control. He invited us onto his house boat. He fed the fish for us to see how he raises them. We went inside his house too. It was small, mostly 2 rooms. There was a tiny bathroom on there (that probably flushed into the bay. He has a wife and one child, they were at market. Apparently Cuc was surprised he only had 1 child. Many of the boat people have many many children. They don’t know how not to have children, but there are some programs to educate people how to not have children. It’s bad to have so many because they don’t have much money. After looking at his house, we got back on the row boat.

Cuc told us about children in Vietnam. Apparently, you are allowed to have 2 children only. Everyone wants a boy, though. But if you have more than 2 children, you have to pay a tax. It used to be that you had to retire from the government early (and everyone worked for the government) so it was very bad. Now you pay a tax. Some people will have 6 girls and pay taxes for them trying to have a boy. And, in the rural areas, a man will take another wife to try to have a boy. The boys take care of the parents when the parents are old. The girls get married and go to live with their husband’s family. So it’s important to have a boy. Cuc has 2 girls. But don’t worry about her, more on her in a minute. You’re not allowed to have more than 1 wife anymore, so that’s done in secret. Sometimes the wives live in the same house. I can’t imagine that. Since many people don’t know how to not get pregnant, there are programs to teach them. But the people having kids now are from families of 6-14 kids. This is because people used to have as many kids as possible because the more of you there were, the better chances of being taken care of and the more power you had, etc. But there wasn’t always enough food. People used to starve a lot. But now, as every tour guide and the lecturer proudly told us, Vietnam exports rice. It exports so much rice that it is the 2^nd largest exporter of rice. And people eat 3 meals a day. In the war time they only got 2, and they were supposed to take a handful of rice from each meal and put it aside to give to the soldiers. Ironically, those soldiers were fighting us.

We rowed out around one of the mountains of Halong Bay. It got quiet on the other side of the mountain, and it was harder to row. But this lady kept rowing us. She was a tiny thing but super-strong. Some little kids spotted us and yelled “hello” from across the bay. They were excited to see us (or to see Brant’s head, I’m not sure which). There weren’t many white people anywhere in this place, the tourists we saw were Vietnamese. So we really stood out everywhere we went. Brant is so tall here. I’m even tall here. I’m the height of the men and I’m taller than all the women pretty much. It’s nice. Cuc was probably 4’11” and 80 lbs.

After the house boat, we went to a floating restaurant. It was a huge complex. We walked around and saw all the fish being kept in the compartments. We walked on planks separating the fish pens on the ground. The whole thing was being held up by floating barrels and tires. Cuc helped us order. The food was delicious. We had the grouper and shrimp and spring rolls and corn chowder and all sorts of stuff. We were the only ones in this huge restaurant. Apparently during the high season it’s packed. We gave the woman who had rowed us for an hour $10 instead of $2. That will go a long way here. Her boat lasts 3-4 years if she takes care of it well. And a new boat costs $100. So our $10 will really help her family.

During lunch, Cuc told us her life story, basically. She was born in a small rural village. Her family made rice cakes. So they picked the rice and dried it out and then did something with it. There were 8 kids in her family. 5 girls and 3 boys. Her mother didn’t like the girls. She treated the boys very well. She said that the boys could go to school the whole way, until they were 15, but the girls had to stop when they were 10 to work. They only went to school ½ days in her village. Cuc and all of her sisters worked in the rice fields the other ½ day. Her brothers got to play ball and goof off the rest of the day, they didn’t have to work. Cuc was upset by her mother saying that she could not go to school anymore. Her teacher liked her and wanted to help her since she was so bright. He went to her parents home and offered to pay Cuc’s tuition to continue school until she was 15 so that she could take the exam and see if she could go on to college and then University (they have a different system here. It’s primary for 6-10 and secondary from 10-15 and then you take a test to go to college/high school from 15-18 and then you take another exam to see if you can go to University). Her mother refused and said she could not continue school past that year. Girls must work for the family in the fields. It didn’t matter if she got an education, because after working in the fields and at home grinding out these rice cakes, Cuc was going to be married in several years and go live with her husband’s family. So her mother wanted her to just work instead of school, because the education wouldn’t benefit their family. Cuc was very upset. She didn’t know what to do. Then they had a contest in Vietnam. It was a writing contest. The question was “What impresses you about Vietnam.” Cuc worked very hard to prepare for this test. She took the test. And she got the highest score in all of Vietnam! She was famous. She was in newspapers all over the country. It was in 1974. A couple of her brothers were in the war in Saigon fighting. They had no contact with home, but they heard her name on the radio. All kinds of people came to their house to interview Cuc and to interview her teacher. Cuc’s father was very pleased. He killed a chicken every time the interviewers came to serve to them. (They only ate chicken on very special days, like holidays, so this was huge). Cuc’s neighbors even led photographers to come stand on some boxes and peek in her room. She shared a bed with her 4 sisters, so they’d pop up and take a picture of the 5 girls in bed in the house. Since she did so well on the test and everything, her mother said she could stay in school. Getting the best score meant that she could go to college to become a teacher. But teachers were poorly paid and poor. Cuc wanted to be a writer or a journalist and to travel and have money. The only way to do this was to take the test to get into the University. So she studied hard again. She studied and studied. If she didn’t make it, she would have to make rice cakes the rest of her life. Well, she passed the test. Only 2 people in her whole village had ever passed the test to get into the University. The other is currently the Vietnamese ambassador to Australia! So she got to go to the University in the big city. Since she did so well, her mother let her other sisters stay in school too. Of all 8 kids, only Cuc’s youngest sister passed the test. None of her brothers did. I asked Cuc what she wrote about that won. She wrote about the rice fields of Vietnam. They had to evacuate their town during the war and live in the rice fields. But at night they could see the lights of the bombs going off and hear the explosions. She wrote about those lights and the rice fields and did some sort of analogy between rice, bombs, and Hanoi and Saigon. Anyways, once in University she wanted to be a writer. But then the government decided it needed more people to major in English, so they made her switch her major to English and Russian. Then they trained her to be a tour guide. She eventually got married and didn’t return home. She started a night school for English to supplement her government-salaried job. One of her students was her future husband, and he asked her out in English. They have 2 daughters. Her oldest made it into University. Only 2% of people get to go to University. She is paying for her daughter to learn extra things. Her daughter took the test to get into University and study Chinese, but Cuc is paying extra for her to have English classes as well. So she’ll be fluent in Chinese and English, which I bet will be very good in the future. Her husband and her think alike. He would never take another wife to have a boy. They are happy with their 2 daughters. They don’t have to live with his family, they have their own place. So she’s lucky. Many wives have to live with their husband’s families and if they don’t have a boy, the family gets another wife for the son to try to have a boy with. Her husband is a math teacher and makes souvenir boxes to supplement their income. He picks up their younger daughter from school every day. Cuc has her salaried job as a tour guide (6 days a week, including many overnight tours) and teaches night classes of English 3 nights a week. Most people here have 2 jobs. Everyone works incredibly hard. They all remember starving, so they work incredibly hard to support themselves and provide for their kids. I never saw anyone lounging around. Everyone tries to have a house by the road and then they have a shop in their house. So that’s why the roads are just lined with one tiny shop after another. They are trying to supplement their income. Cuc and her husband work very hard too. Unfortunately, she never did get to become a journalist. She didn’t get to travel either. She’s only been to 3 cities in her whole life… Haiphong, Hanoi, and Halong Bay. She’s never even been to Saigon. And she’s not rich. But she’s also a long way from where she came from. Hopefully her daughters can take the next steps that she couldn’t.

Anyways, after an 1 ½ hour lunch during which we heard Cuc’s story, a humongous boat pulled up. It was just for us, even though it’s built for 44 passengers! We sailed around the beautiful bay. We went first to a cave on one of the little islands. The cave was humongous. It had tons of stalactites and stalagmites. I sent you a post card from it. It was very beautiful. In Vietnam they have 4 sacred animals… a turtle, a unicorn, a dragon and a sphinx. They found the dragon and the turtle in the rocks. (Formations of stalactites and rocks in the cave that looked like the dragon and the turtle). I went around looking for formations that looked like unicorns and sphinxes. I didn’t find any. The stairs going up to the cave and down were very steep. Apparently the cave was found by a fisherman in 1994. He moved his family in there and started selling tickets. This was bad because people were going there and breaking off stalactites to take home as souvenirs. So the government wanted to take it from the fisherman. But the fisherman didn’t want to give it up. They kept negotiating. At one point, the farmer barricaded himself and his family in the cave and threatened to blow themselves and the caves up with dynamite if the government tried to enter. Eventually, the government made a deal with them. The fisherman and his son could stay at the cave and have jobs taking care of it, and the government would pay the fisherman a sum of money for finding the cave. So they did that and turned it into a park and visitors are now able to go in through more formal paths and can’t take the stalactites. But, since that happened, a whole lot of Vietnamese people went to Halong Bay to hunt for caves to get a reward from the government. They’re like treasure-hunters. They go there and try to find a cave hoping they can make money getting a reward from the government. But if the fishermen that have lived there for generations haven’t found them (and they’re looking too), it’s unlikely the people from the cities and countryside will be able to.

After the cave, we reboarded the boat (having to go down some slippery decrepit steps and then climb onto a boat near our boat in order to climb from that boat onto our boat, since there were so many boats jammed in). Then we went to a floating fishing village. In between a couple of mountain islands there is a pretty floating village. It has 100 families. You have to be 3^rd generation fisherman in order to be allowed to live on a house boat. They even have a little school in this village, paid for personally by the UK ambassador to Vietnam. It was a cute place. They had TVs in their houses and everything. They are happy there since they get so many fish and make a good living.

Then we went and sailed past the famous tiny “fighting cocks” islands that are on all the postcards. They look like sails to me, or a queen kissing a lion. Brant and I had several things we thought they looked like besides fighting cocks. Finally, we sailed around the rest of the beautiful bay and back to the harbor.

One of the islands is called “monkey island.” They don’t allow visitors anymore. They have 2000 monkeys there. 5 families live there and care for the monkeys, which they use part of the brains of to make a vaccine for something that sounded like polio. Anyways, these monkeys are very noisy and very clever. They’ve formed 2 tribes with a leader of each. It was fascinating to hear about. Apparently the monkey fall in love and mate. They try to separate them (I wasn’t sure about why) and take one to a different island. The monkeys will swim back to the island to be with their lover! They supplement the monkeys’ food with 3 bowls of milky rice a day. They set out the bowls and ring the bell for one of the 2 groups of monkeys to come in (they have to do it separate because the 2 tribes will fight). Then the leader monkey will come down and take a bowl of rice and look around. If it seems ok he climbs a tree and motions with his hand for the rest of the monkeys to come in. They come in a few at a time to feed. If a female monkey is pretty, she’ll take 2 rice bowls and the leader monkey will look the other way while she does it. But all other monkeys can only take 1 bowl each. The whole place sounded so neat. We’re learning a lot about monkeys! In Singapore they have a monkey island with a monkey college on it. The monkeys are trained to climb up trees and pick coconuts. Other countries send their monkeys there to get trained!