The hotel is excellent and has a rooftop bar and a decent restaurant. But it is placed a bit too far outside the actual centre, where there are more restaurants and shops. The part of town where the hotel is located is significantly more modern, with large, completely newly built and beachfront residential areas. But something is not right, for almost no one lives here. Most houses are just empty shells. Built on speculation before the pandemic when tourism was booming in Vietnam. Now no one can afford to buy them, and they form a strange and gloomy ghost town. We see similar empty, half-finished buildings elsewhere as well, even in Cambodia, but nowhere is the failure as grand as here in Ha Long Bay.
We take a walk down to the seafront area and we meet a man who is exercising in an outdoor gym. He tells us about the sad background of the housing project, but he doesn’t live here; he could never afford it. He lives in a high-rise not far from our hotel, with his wife and children.
You go to Ha Long to see the magical archipelago. One thousand six hundred sugarloaf-shaped islands, several of them with caves. They are made of limestone, so rainwater slowly erodes them.
Tours out into the archipelago are organised by a number of shipping companies and tour operators, and a large number of boats are constantly circling among the islands. We are “lucky” and get to ride on a rather luxurious boat where excellent food and drinks are served on board. We also have a funny man as our guide, he calls himself Mr. Bean …
After an hour of a calm and pleasant cruise among the sugarloaf mountains, we land on Bo Hon Island and enter the Sung Sot Cave, the largest in the entire Ha Long archipelago. First, we pass through two smaller chambers with imaginative stalactite formations, but it is in the third chamber that our jaws drop. A ten thousand square meters cave hall surpasses everything we have seen before.
Another more bizarre archipelago destination is Ti Top Island, a small rocky outcrop that juts out of the sea. There is a small sandy beach and nowadays, due to the many visitors, there is also a café, always full.
How the island got its name is a peculiar story. In 1962, the founding father Ho Chi Minh came here accompanied by a Russian cosmonaut, Gherman Titov. Unknown today, but he was the second Soviet man in space (after Gagarin). The journey was a propaganda and friendship gesture towards the Soviet Union, and to truly impress, Ho renamed the island, naming it “Titop” after the cosmonaut A large statue of Titov stands today on the beach.
A standard part of many excursions in the Ha Long archipelago is transferring to a smaller, faster motorboat to experience the thrill of speed on the water. Our helmsman probably gets a bit too enthusiastic as he swings back and forth, and suddenly the engine dies. We are drifting closer and closer to a cliff when another boat finally picks us up after half an hour.
Before we are back in port, Mr. Bean takes control of the microphone and performs a crazy karaoke version of a tribute to . . . Uncle Ho!
Now we continue south and end up in a small picturesque town with narrow streets and lots of life and activity. We also get to see “Vietnam’s Angkor Wat.”
