Within the Water
We are never far from water in Vietnam, which comforts me. On the highway, small pagodas dot the distance across low-lying fields, furrowed with water and soil and tufts of what I wonder whether is rice. The view from breakfast on the 63rd floor of our hotel is of the Red River, and mist in the distance that lets you imagine that it’s the coast and the water stretches on forever. (It isn’t; the mist is air pollution, hiding only its dirty secrets.) Hanoi means within the water or between the water: the city surrounded by the Red River.
We arrive in Vietnam (which in Vietnamese is two words: Việt Nam) late at night, around 10PM, and are greeted by a woman from our offshore vendor Cennos, whom we’re here to visit. She secures a small bus for us accompanies us to our hotel while I send good thoughts to Victoria, hanging back at the airport to await her husband James, somehow on a later flight due to a sketchy visa situation. (You need a visa to enter Vietnam, although our travel agent told us our +1s didn’t. I happened to get Matthias one by mistake in a fit of administrative overachievement when I was applying for mine, so we were fine.)
We’ve been travelling for twenty-four hours at this point, enough time that time has become irrelevant. We need to sleep because we have to wake up at 6AM so that we can eat breakfast before taking a Lyft (called Grab here) downtown to the Opera House in order to be able to catch an 8AM tour bus to Halong Bay. We’ll be five minutes late, but the bus will be 15 minutes later, which is appropriate. It would be rude to be on time.
Once we arrive at our hotel room, we check in with all of our collective mothers and agree solemnly with them that we do indeed need to sleep, but once we hang up Matthias and I attempt to explore the rooftop instead. We fail because there are two elevator banks in this hotel and at the top of the one that we take is not the rooftop. The restaurant smells weird, almost like outside, before I realise it’s just cigarette smoke and you can smoke in here. Still, we catch some views before heading back to our room to unpack, pack for Halong Bay, and wash the travel off us before enjoying sleeping prone again.
This country is not made for a man of Matthias’s size. He has to squat to use the urinals, scrapes his fro on the door coming out of the ATM, can’t stand inside the tour bus. He’s even easier to find in a crowd, though—something I anticipate coming in handy at some point given his proclivities to wander.
Matthias corrects me that Vietnam is more of a ‘culture shock’ than Belgium when I say that I already like it better. ‘Yeah, it’s more different,’ I agree, but what I’m really thinking is that it’s more chaotic, and I love having to trust total strangers and rely on the controlled chaos. On the roads, 80 million motorbikes share lenient lanes and traffic lights that we can only figure are suggestions at best with cars and busses, inching along together almost touching, cars and busses honking politely to communicate, ‘I’m here, something’s about to happen’ as they overtake motorbikes. Everything seems vaguely under construction, probably because it is. People make space for each other along the sidewalk or merge slowly into traffic as pedestrians, waving to oncoming traffic to indicate that they are crossing the street. It’s winter, but it’s warm. There’s fresh fruit, so much of it. I eat rambutans—my favourite fruit—with breakfast.
Update: The things I thought were pagodas might actually be graves, above ground because the water table is so high, tiny because the bones are too.
On our way to Halong Bay (another term that is more words in Vietnamese: Hạ Long) we stop at one of those tourist trap pit stops for a 30-minute break. Matthias and I leave the pit stop to walk along whatever highway town has sprung up along this route, in search of some cops in tan uniforms to take a picture with (neither navy nor olive drab will do, although we pass both). Suddenly he declares, ‘We’re going in here,’ and turns into a skinny shop. I hang a bit behind to take pictures of it.
The skinny shop xiao ha 
I spy… 
…with my little eye
When I join up with him, he’s holding a fantastic sweater with what appear to be red carrots or long radishes all over it. We have to have it. We bring it to the front of the shop. The price tag says it costs the equivalent of $78, but that can’t be right. This isn’t enough of a touristy place for tourist prices like that. This isn’t enough of a touristy country for tourist prices like that. We calculate a max price and attempt to haggle before realising that we’ve forgotten to carry a 0 in our calculations, and what we thought was $78 is actually $7.80, which is so reasonable that we don’t even bother haggling. O, math. Matthias can’t get over how ridiculously high the exchange rate is.
A couple hours after the pit stop, we arrive at Halong Bay. It’s…a resort town. A fabricated beach stretches along the shore, replete with transplanted palm trees. Pastel hotels or whatever they are line the opposite side of the road, like looming empty pastilles, fresh and new and waiting. Matthias thinks they’re so pretty. We pass a water park and stare up at gondolas that glide past a Ferris wheel.
We get off the bus at an International Seaport building that looks right out of the French colonial era and wait while our tour guide, Ben, does some paperwork. I realise there’s WiFi and log on to send most of what I wanted to get out of a somewhat scattered Slack message back to work before Ben returns and we’re walking to the wharf.
We hop onto a tender with the rest of our party: a group of six Europeans and four Vietnamese, including one ancient lady who holds her own. Out in the harbour on our way to our boat, we stare at the dozens of other boats that look exactly like ours. We pull up to a pair of junk boats and then pull between them, wedging the tender between the two boats like some ancient simple machine. We disembark and meet in the dining room upstairs for a debriefing on our day’s activities. At the end, we’re handed our room keys, and we split up to go settle in before meeting back upstairs for lunch. Matthias and I have the room at the bow of the ship on the lower deck, windows out both sides.
There’s never a shortage of food on the boat, and we’re served more lunch than we can finish. They accommodate us two vegetarians and Drew who doesn’t like seafood. While we eat lunch, we cruise towards a cave called Surprise Cave or Amazing Cave, depending. (I like Surprise; Matthias likes Amazing.) The whole boat tour thing is rather touristy, but also a lovely way to see the various things there are to see in Halong Bay; I cant imagine how else you’d do it. Every attraction in Halong Bay is basically ‘someone was at this island within recent history’, but to reduce it to that is to do it a grave disservice. I wonder what future generations of tourists will see in Halong Bay. There are close to two thousand islands in the bay, and we visit only two of them, technically.
We boat around Halong Bay on our little junky junk boat, sighing the deep sighs of finally being away from home with no way to work. I believe the kids call it disconnecting, but really we’ve just made the space to connect with each other more. It’s the weekend. We have only two things on our to-do list: Surprise Cave, and Ti-Top Island.
Both of these are touristy, but in a nice way. Surprise Cave is a series of three chambers, each larger than the last, and the last complete with a shrivelled red phallic shape protruding from a rock formation. Surprise.
Ti-Top Island is so named for a Vietnamese military commander who landed here and devised a defensive strategy for the bay. Legend has it that these islands are what’s left of dragons who descended upon the bay at the request of a royal emperor or princess or something who wanted to protect the land and the beauty of north Vietnam, and summoned them to the bay to defend it. Ha Long means Descending Dragon: Descending Dragon Bay.
Once back on the boat, with the promise of a warm shower dangling before us, we are treated to a toast of quite weak red rice wine. They don’t drink much here as a rule, and our tour guide Ben doesn’t even like alcohol, but toasts with us and takes a sip just to be a good host. Everyone on the boat gathers, and we’re taught a traditional Vietnamese toast:
Một, hai, ba, zo! (one, two, three, cheers!)
– Ben, our faithful tour guide
Hai, ba, zo (two, three, cheers)
Hai, ba, uống (two, three…drink!)
(It seems an awfully long time to wait for alcohol if you ask me. My people typically just nod at one another and offer a, ‘Hope your liver doesn’t fall off!’ (‘Sláinte’) before taking another gulp.)
The toast checked off, and after our walk through the cave and our ten-minute stair-climb up to the gazebo atop Ti-Top Island, it’s time for a shower. The hot water on the boat is switched on and we take a quick wash before changing for dinner.
Before we’re allowed to eat dinner though, we’re taught to make spring rolls, wrapping vegetables, eggs, herbs, and rice noodles in thin, brittle rice paper before dipping it for 1-2-3 seconds in a sauce of water, soy sauce, rice vinegar, seasonings, and definitely some fish sauce to soften the wrapper. Should’ve brought my vegan fish sauce. I find the pungent taste of dried fish pervasive in any dish.
At dinner we are dead delirious from jet lag. I don’t think any of us remembers what we ate, and certainly not what we said. (Correction: Tessa remembers some of what we ate.) Like at lunch, the food is abundant, and we won’t go hungry. They accommodate vegetarians and others with food restrictions. We try some creative mock meats that I really like and will never be able to find again. But mostly I check my phone, counting down the minutes until it’s 8 o’clock and acceptable for us to go to bed.
Except we don’t go to bed. Apparently it’s the 50th birthday of one of the Vietnamese women, and she’s out here with her husband, daughter, and one of the daughter’s grandmothers to celebrate it. They’ve bought cakes and wine and traditional Vietnamese snacks want to share them with all of us on the boat in celebration.
Imagine, dear reader, if you will for a second, one of those times when you’re drunk, but you know you’re drunk, and that knowledge makes you think that you got this. You stand up and land the stand. You start walking and you’re convinced that you’re convincing others that you’re not as drunk as you are. You go to the bathroom, turn on the light, shut the door, open the lid of the toilet, but when you go to sit down you slide right off and fall off the seat. Hopefully no one heard.
The is approximately how jet lagged I was feeling as I watched the minutes past 8PM tick away and continued to wonder not only how it was that we still couldn’t yet leave, but also how I was still standing and presumably (hopefully) making pleasant facial expressions.
We muster enough awareness to show our gratitude and not offend them. They play the traditional Happy Birthday song (i.e. the one that you’re hearing in your head right now, white American), and then some kind of Vietnamese remix that they keep on repeat, boring into our brains.
By 9 we are back in our bunk, and Matthias and I fall asleep where we land, still in our clothes. I’m not exaggerating: we sort of just fell on the bed and snuggled for a second, and then it was an hour later and I was waking up briefly. I put us to bed, setting an alarm so we can make our 7AM breakfast and pulling the covers up so we can sleep like the dead until then.
At 6:30 I wake up and shut off the alarm, intrigued by the novelty of waking up moving in the middle of the water. The light is nice and bright and indirect, and I open the curtains to watch islands float past for a bit before making sure Matthias is up. By 6:45 we are up and in the shower, which surprises me by being warm and not cold. We pull on whatever clothes and wander up to breakfast, swinging around the super precarious front of the boat, which lacks a railing but features a staircase that pitches straight off the bow.
My memory of breakfast is clearer; at least, I remember discussing how we couldn’t remember much about dinner because we were all so delirious with exhaustion. I quell worries that start to surface about how I’ll feel the second night after returning home.
What we thought would be a restful overnight trip to Halong Bay proves to be a bit too fast-paced for travellers who started the journey less than twelve hours after landing. The second day we visit a pearl farm, learn about pearl farming, and lament the Mohs hardness of pearls.
We then go kayaking, complete with a brief argument between Matthias and me about whether we’ll be wet enough to warrant leaving our things behind; I—never without it whilst travelling—have brought my camera, and he’s brought his fanny pack from his Halloween costume (a cup; it…makes sense when you see it), which has proven ridiculously useful already on this trip. I argue that we won’t get that wet and win, a lucky thing because…
We’re first out of the gate and paddle away quickly—both silently knowing that we’re trying to go as far as fast as possible—and pick some destination within our 45-minute interval that seems worth a stop. Monkey Island is the only one Matthias cares to visit, but we’re not sure which of these two thousand islands it is, so we settle for aiming for some sort of cave-looking thing across the bay.
‘The real question,’ Matthias posits as we pull up, ‘Is whether we’re going to get out of the kayak…’ which is Matthias-speak for ‘Is Meaghan going to be any fun?’ Thankfully I’m feeling fun, so I secure our kayak as best as I can with some rocks and climb out of the boat, expecting to explore a pristine semi-jungle in one of the most picturesque locations on the planet.
Instead, as I crest the top of the rocks where we landed, I’m greeted with a sea of…trash. Matthias is still climbing out of the kayak.
‘Trash! It’s full of trash!’ I call back to him incredulously. ‘What!?’ he calls back. ‘Come see!’
I hear distant crunching and wonder whether anyone is living here, and which of us is more scared of the other. There’s innumberable refuse. You know when you’re on a hike in the woods and find the secret grotto of teenagers who sneak out to drink? This was that multiplied a thousandfold. Ten-thousand-fold. I’ve no idea how so much trash got to this corner of the bay, and up a series of rocks. Do they throw the trash here? Is this the Trash Island? Are all of the islands trash islands somewhere? Does human exceptionalism know no bounds?
There’s even a junky junk boat over here, marooned or else the trash boat—impossible to say. We stay for pictures while I worry that the trash is going to swallow my love whole, and we climb down when our timer to return goes off. Paddling back, I think of all the hoarders in the world, and the unbelievable amount of trash you can pile in one three-dimensional space. I think of how much three-dimensional space there is on this spherical globe.
From kayaking we return on the tender to the junk boat for lunch. I whip out my camera incredulously and force everyone to confront Trash Island. I’m so pissed off at the human race.
After lunch I calm down enough to enjoy lying on a lounge chair on the top deck, watching that picturesque scenery scroll by. It reminds me vaguely of the tour Daddy and I took of the three lakes in Galway, the day I nearly killed him, death by hill climb. There were no trash islands there.