Cruising along in the Halong Bay

Cruises appeal to lots of people, but they don’t sound all that great to me. I don’t like the idea of sitting around and doing nothing, even as beautiful scenery goes by. Boats are awesome, but they’re tools to me. You don’t sit idly on a boat. You fish from one, dive from another and get hauled in an inner tube from another.

Vegas shows are for Vegas. So are casinos. Swimming can be done from a boat, but I’m not sure why anyone would want to swim in a boat. It’s contradictory to me.

And I don’t like sitting around with nothing to do. To me, cruises have no point.

But I thought I’d give it a try anyway, just for one night.

From what I read, the big thing worth doing in Vietnam was to see the Halong Bay by boat, and the only way to do it by boat was to take a cruise, so I figured this would be a good test of whether or not I could adapt to a cruise.

Although I slept pretty good in my little room, the answer to that is still a resounding no, but the bay was absolutely gorgeous. I’d definitely recommend the one-night cruise. (They had a two-night, and even the drunken Australian group acknowledged that it got boring the second day.)

The bay is one of the Seven Wonders of the Something World; not sure which category it falls under. It’s just this fairly peaceful (there were lots of tour boats) large area of water with mountainous rocks, or maybe they were little mountains. Apparently, from the sea, the rocks appear like a wall, but as you get closer, you realize they’re spread out and you can go in between them with plenty of room to spare.

I didn’t see any critters like goats or things living on the rocks – how would they have gotten there? – but there were, according to some sign, 76 species of birds. There were also lots of fish, apparently, because my highlight was getting in a little rowboat thing and touring “floating fishing,” which was a village of fishermen who lived on the water.

Their houses looked like little floating dollhouses, and it was cool to see people hanging out in hammocks, seeing laundry hanging from a boat or a noticing a couple of dogs wandering around on the docks.

Up close, the mountain things were incredible awesome. They had lots of foliage growing out of them, which was odd because there was no dirt, only rock. It was just beautiful.

We had another land excursion in the afternoon, where we hung out on a little beach for about 45 minutes. Some folks swam and others kayaked, but I just waded.

I would have loved to kayak, but you had to have two people and I was by myself.

And that was a different level of awkward. It wasn’t a higher level, just a different one. Everyone else was in twos or fours, for the most part, and it was very odd and uncomfortable to just go plop down by a small group at lunch, which was the first thing we did on the cruise.

When we boarded, I was walking behind an American couple. Young, but early 30s young, not college young. The woman, whose name was Rowena, was talking to her husband and telling him something about how the tour director told her to “go ask her husband” and apparently that was a joke between them.

With his sunglasses on, her husband, Jonathan, was a dead ringer for Billy Currington. Without them and with his regular glasses, though, he looked a little more like the college professor that he actually was, but only a little more. Messy hair and unshaven can only translate so much to professor of quantum whatever it was.

I sat next to them for lunch, and chatted a bit. They were nice, but I didn’t want to encroach on their vacation, so I did try to sit elsewhere for the next meal, but they got re-routed to me again to make room for a larger group at the table where they’d been seated.

They were really nice and at the second meal, we speculated about some of the other groups. One in particular was odd – three men, late 40s to maybe early 60s – traveling with one Asian woman. The American couple had some wild theories, but being the reporter I am, I just went over and asked them.

They were three Italian friends (two attorneys and a knee surgeon) who had hired a guide. On the “floating fishing” side trip, I wound up in a boat with them and they were pretty fun. Our rower was an older lady and these guys – Hairy, Alan Arkin and No Pants, I named them – were pretty heavy and they took over for her, almost capsizing us in the process.

Hairy spoke some English and he was the one from whom I gleaned the information. When I told him I was from Florida, he said he’d been there; he’d spent two weeks in Vero Beach a few years ago. That’s random.

We also had a group of four English speakers. My transport from the hotel was with them, and I was exhausted and trying to doze and place their accents on the two-hour ride to the bay. I was completely baffled because I couldn’t tell if they had Kiwi, Aussie, Scottish or English accents. One would talk and I think I had it, then another would answer and it would sound different. Yet they were all together.

Turns out, they all worked for an American company but were from all over. Specifically, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland and Britain. So I felt a lot better about my ability to place accents.

One couple was from Australia, and we also had two couples from England. The two were traveling together, and one was on their honeymoon. Now, why you would bring another couple along on your honeymoon I never figured out, and didn’t have a chance to ask.

A Spanish couple was also along, and I felt really bad for them because no one spoke Spanish. The American couple knew some words and conversed a little, but it was pretty much sign language until Hairy started speaking Italian to them and they understood.

That was pretty amusing, because an Australian couple had been sitting with them at dinner and I could tell they were really into trying to communicate. Australian Woman had told me the Spanish couple was traveling for six months and would be going to Australia soon. When we realized that Hairy could communicate, the lady asked him to find out when they were coming to Australia.

Well, the heart of communication is not only relaying the message, but having it understood. When Hairy got the reply, it turned out that the couple was not traveling for six months. They had never taken a longer trip than two weeks.

So no idea what happened there, but it clearly had been a fun conversation. Just not one that was understood on both sides.