Ha Long Bay

Ha Long Bay is what Yangshuo would look like if it was flooded. It's stunning. There are thousands of islands rising out of the sea of pale green water, many of them ripe for climbing.

I was indifferent at first, but that was apparently the draw for us: deep water soloing. We booked a tour that had us shuttled around like cattle onto this bus and this boat, eat now, sleep here, let's go to a cave. It was nice enough, but I was in a foul mood to start with. The bed bugs that ravaged me after karaoke on the boat the first night didn't lighten my mood either.

We stayed for a night on Monkey Island after that, at a quiet little beach resort from where we hiked to see the eponymous monkeys frolicking. After that night, instead of getting shuttled back to boat to bus to boat to bus, we ditched the group on Cat Ba Island.

Cat Ba is the biggest island in Ha Long Bay, and home to the only thing resembling a city: a strip of tall cement hotels along the waterfront with villages and national park behind it. We booked a soloing trip for the next day.

We wound up soloing two days. We made some friends the first day, had a blast, and went back for more the second day, though it was grayer and colder than the first day, which was a tad gray and cold to begin with.

Didn't matter. The soloing was great. Putter up to a vertical island on a basket boat, grab onto the wall and hold on while the boat backs away. Climb up until you fall or until you're so high that you don't want to jump, and then you jump anyway. I found one of the joys of this was taking photos at high speed as people were falling and then zooming in on the faces they made. Sorry Randy, but this one is one of my favorites:



Evenings were pretty quiet in town. After coming back from the bar or a friend's room, the hotels had steel curtains down and we had to bang on them to get in or out. Hotels were also, as I said, tall, and Adam and I were on the 7th floor of a place with no elevator. Just exercise though, I didn't really mind.

After four nights on the island, relaxing, climbing, jumping off boats, cruising on scooters, Adam and I tagged onto the latest batch of tourists coming from Monkey Island, where we had ditched our tour days before, and got back on the bus to Hanoi.