I think I'm going to find this post difficult to write, partly because I don't particularly like the photos I took of the area and partly because I'm in serious danger of sounding like that most awful of things: a travel snob. I'll do my best to avoid this, I'll try to explain my misgivings in a fairly neutral manner, if it reads back as snobbish, then so be it. But I'll build to that......
The Bay of the Descending Dragon, then, is the translation of Ha Long Bay, that place I had so long wanted to visit. It can be found,
here, about 100 miles from the capital, Hanoi. Over the course of 75 miles there are approximately 3,000 limestone islands that abruptly jut out of the sea in a way that I have always found captivating. The bay was recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in the mid '90s and has risen steadily up the list of 'Must Sees' on the average tourist's itinerary ever since. Some of the islands are very small and just a few hundred square metres in size whilst the largest, Cat Ba, is more like 150 square kilometres. One thing they have in common is that they are all smothered in fairly dense tree cover that, on the larger islands, is diverse enough to support quite a broad range of fauna. There are various goat type animals and some more exotic ones like
Golden Headed Langurs,
rhesus macaques and even some
leopard cats. Research reveals that the islands were formed as a limestone plateau slowly sunk down and collapsed over millions of years; what made certain clumps remain standing proud I have no idea.
Although the area has very little habitable land it does, nonetheless, sustain a community that can trace it's ancestry back over millennia. Today, their traditional way of life has, depending on your viewpoint, adapted/become threatened by the influx of modern tourism. Living their entire lives on a series of boats and pontoons all lashed together they used to survive by fishing and exchanging their catch for land-based commodities. Nowadays they instead survive by providing kayaking opportunities to the glut of tourists that flow through the area.
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| A rare glimpse of blue sky |
It takes a long time to learn your way around Ha Long Bay, to know which channels are deep enough for your vessel, which flow the way you want them to and so on, and this has often led to it being a stronghold of resistance from foreign invasion be it by the United States, who heavily mined the area leaving some parts unsafe even to this day, or the long term Vietnamese enemy, China. There is no love lost between these two countries, China has been trying to either occupy or exert it's influence over Vietnam for thousands of years. Earlier this year China was to be found
pushing the bounds of Vietnam's sovereignty and in the news whilst we were there there were stories about China chancing it's arm by occupying a small, resource-rich island in the South China Sea that belongs to Vietnam. In the late 13th century Ha Long Bay played an important role in the expulsion of the great Northern Enemy from it's territories. Then it was in the form of the armies of the famous Kublai Khan, grandson of the infamous Genghis Khan, that had invaded. The locals of Ha Long Bay drove massive bamboo spikes into the seabed just below the surface and then forced the enemy vessels onto them sewing panic and confusion into the fleet and opening them up to defeat.
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| Not our boat, but they were all very similar to this |
At that time Vietnam was known as Dai Viet and only extended as far south as what is currently thought of as central Vietnam; the south being occupied by the Champa people of My Son fame that I talked about in a
previous post. It was many years later that the Vietnam we might recognise today came into being by incorporating the region to the south as the Champa moved out. Indeed, the word Vietnam means Viet - people, Nam - south; People of the South. This doesn't specifically refer to the south of Vietnam but is more a way of delineating itself from the Enemy of the North, China and Mongolia. As an aside, Vietnam should actually be written in two words: Viet Nam. In fact many of the words that the west uses should be two or more; Ha Noi, Sai Gon, Da Lat, Dien Bin Phu. The contractions of these words only came about in western circles as reports started coming back from the front line as the French and then Americans went to war there. The journalists used the Telex system to file their reports and this charged by the word so they just contracted some words to save money. There is talk of a move to make an effort to resort back to original spellings but some officials are reticent to upset or confuse potential foreign investors.
But now I'm rambling, back to the Bay, and then my gripe.....
One thing I didn't know about Ha Long Bay before I got there was that it has masses of caves. We had about 20-30 minutes in one of these caves, The Cave of Marvels (so named by 19th century French tourists), and I got some interesting photos whilst I was in there. The photos look quite bright but that's because the exposures are all in the region of 6 seconds or so; luckily I had thought to take my trusty tripod with me. Although they add some unusual colours to the photos it was a bit off putting to see the caves lit up by so many multi-coloured lights. It leant an air of Disney-style tackiness to the set up which was more of a distraction than an enhancement. Also, when I say we had maybe 30 minutes in there that's probably being generous. We were all but marched through with a couple of hundred other tourists and I can't help but feel that this was not the best way to contemplate the endless millennia that had gone into creating such mesmerising formations. And so begins my moan.
Almost everything in this blog post that resembles a fact or useful piece of information about Ha Long Bay and it's caves I got from the hours of research I do before starting a post like this. It probably takes me 3-6 hours on average to come up with a wordy post like this one, each fact I come up with I try to verify from a second source - and I never use Wikipedia. Normally I take the info I gleaned from tour guides or local people, try to verify it somewhere and then write it up. In this case the only thing I learnt from the tour guide or anyone in the vicinity was that the monolithic outcrops were made from limestone, but I spotted that as soon as we landed on one. Pollution is known to be an increasing problem in the Ha Long Bay area, the water was pretty filthy anywhere near a shoreline from both the diesel engines that power their boats and from their day to day refuse; locals tend to just throw their rubbish into the water. This might not have been a problem when all they were throwing overboard was food scraps and bamboo, but when it's countless pieces of plastic then the problem builds rapidly. This was indicative of the general attitude that seemed to permeate the region; the locals didn't seem to care about this amazing place in which they lived and that fed through to the tourist experience. They didn't provide any information about the area, didn't explain it's rich history, didn't tell us anything about their culture, they didn't make you feel at all welcome; it was like they had heard that tourism was just where you cram as many white people as you can into an area and charge as much as you think you can get away with for the privilege. Well, it's not. There was a cynicism here that I'm more used to seeing in the East End of London.
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| Part of the Cave of Marvels |
I suppose this is where I could be sounding awful. It's easy for me to bemoan the behaviour of people that don't have the wealth and opportunities that I do, people who have to put all their effort into scraping enough money together to feed themselves and eke a living as best they can. But, then, I've been to a lot of places around the world that are far poorer and in far worse shape and don't have such a wonderful natural resource to exploit and yet the local people are still proud of what they do have and they take pleasure in being able to show off this precious commodity. And I don't mind being exploited myself, it's to be expected; I almost always over tip and pay over the odds for things but I'm happy to do so, they need it more than I do. But there was no care, there was no love, there was no respect for their own home; it was just a conveyor belt of tourists. Personally, I think you can take heart in your surroundings no matter where you live and if you can instill a sense of civic pride that permeates a community then those that visit that community will step in line and offer it a similar level of respect.
There are many examples around the world where this careful balance has been achieved, the one that sticks in my mind is that of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu (see my post on it
here). For many years the trail was a free-for-all. Dozens of companies existed to take tourists to this most enchanting of places but there was nothing to say how many they might take, how many tourists per guide there should be, how much to pay the porters or how heavy a bundle the porters have to carry; also, it was becoming clear that the monument and indeed the trail itself was suffering with such a high rate of traffic. But then the Government started taking notice and they put a cap on the number of people allowed in each day, insisted on minimum standards of safety (still quite perilous by Western standards), decreed that the trail would close entirely for one month in the year for cleaning and restoration work and, importantly, a maximum weight and minimum wage was introduced for the amazing porters that do all the hard work and make the whole project run so seamlessly. In fact, I've just had a quick look and the authorities there have made the regulations even more stringent just this summer, there are now only 2,500 visitors per day allowed in to Machu Picchu. Now, this restriction of tourists may have meant less money incoming for local people, but that hasn't happened as the price has risen considerably over the years. Machu Picchu is preserved and local people can still earn a living, it's a good system that works well.
Personally I still found the actual geography and geology of the region very beautiful and worthwhile seeing; although I know that not all of my companions felt similarly. The final nail in the coffin may well have been when they tried to get everyone involved in an evening's karaoke - this was not what we were there to do and, it being a small boat, there weren't many places to hide. The only other event that was laid on was when they pulled up the boat's cook from below decks who showed us how to make spring rolls and then got us to make our own. This was a very simple and cheap way of involving us in something a little more personal and went down very well.
So ends my rant. I was right; I didn't enjoy writing this. I've never written negatively about anywhere I've gone before but, then, generally I always enjoy myself because the local people do such a good job often with very limited means. Soaring mountains, crystal clear lakes, expansive deserts or vast savannas are all well and good, but it's people that really make a place come alive. Hopefully I haven't come across too terribly, but I think I have a point in there somewhere. You can judge.
