Seen along the road on our 2 and a half hour ride to the Bay on Monday:
- Water buffalos grazing in swampy rice paddies. Two of them, with tall, white crane-like birds placidly sitting on their backs.
- A motorbike speeding down the highway carrying what looks like a whole chicken coop on the back, right behind the driver, a trail of feather flutters in the bike's wake.
- Tiny colorful cemetaries full of beautiful mini-pagoda shrines appear amidst palm trees and farm fields.
- Ghost-town housing complexes full of those tall, narrow French Colonial-style buildings, all shining new and empty, standing next to crumbling stone shacks, which are all very clearly occupied. When we ask our guide about it later, he explains that these are the weekend homes of rich Vietnamese. As for the tall, narrow construction style, that is due, he says, to the fact that even the rich Vietnamese can only afford small plots of land, so they expand vertically, building multi-floor homes to contain their traditional multi-generational families, with the elders living on the ground floor and the youngest on the top.
- Farmers in those iconic conical straw hats, toiling in vast fields, harvesting their crops by hands and with bent backs. We pass a long line of tourist buses stopped by the side of the road and crowds of pale, khaki-clad sightseers snapping photos of the farmers and their fields. Maya and I talk about how pissed off we would be if hordes of fat whities on vacation were taking pictures of us, grinning at how "quaint" we were, while we did backbreaking work in the hot sun just so we could feed our families and keep our stone shacks from falling completely apart. We agreed that we'd probably grab a clump from the nearest pile of water buffalo dung and throw it at the tourists.
Arriving at the Bay, we boarded a beautiful, ornate wooden boat where we would have our own cozy cabin. The ever-changing view from the deck as we moved out into the ocean was stunning. The Bay has over 1,000 islands of craggy limestone karst peaks and we wound between more than a few of them. Later we would stop and swim in the clear, cool, salty water (I jumped a good 15 feet from the roof of the boat into the waves); we passed floating villages where whole communities live on the water, among the cliffs, fishing and farming pearls; then we stopped at one particularly large island and explored a cathedral-like cavern, its name translating from Vietnamese to mean "Amazing Cave"; and that evening we had a delicious dinner onboard (cucumber and tomato salad with garlic and chili dressing, shrimp cocktail, fried spring rolls, a nicely spiced grilled fish...) Maya and I thought, eyeing the dramatic land/waterscape around us, that if the Great Wall of China had been like something out of The Lord of the Rings, this reminded us of Skull Island from King Kong.
After dinner we talked deep into the night with this really cool chick named Michaela from Switzerland, who was travelling alone. We shared our travel experiences thus far, discussed why we travel, and most of all, talked about the challenge of staying open to and connecting with the people of whatever country you are visiting when they are obviously so much poorer than you and so many are constantly asking you for money or sometimes, even worse, trying to scam you. Around midnight Maya and I went to bed, and after a somewhat restless sleep in our cabin, we woke early to catch the sunrise.
