3 H’s: Halong Bay, Hue and Hoi An

Day three, three hours and countless villages, coalmines, marble mountains and rice patties later and we’re boarding the Violet and setting sail on Halong Bay. A mystic haze embraces the countless outcrops creating a majestic landscape and journey unlike anything else. As the shore disappears and our Junk sails onward, slowly we become surrounded by the soldiering stones—timeless and powerful, you feel like you’re being transported to the set of Indochine. Bonjour Mme. Deneuve, c’est magnifique n’est ce pas?

As the meditative calm captures your spirit and engages your senses the Violet snakes through another series of guarding ridges protecting the quiet bay and floating village. We explore the marina museum and visit with the children “busy studying” (a.k.a. having a balloon fight) in their floating school. Floating or on stilts, in the jungle or low in the valley you feel the unity… it’s all the same, just different—more faces and wonderful memories captured.

What a stately cabin—private balcony and Jacuzzi tub…(thanks to Lou we’ve been getting upgrades left, right and centre) too bad it’s only for one night, what were we thinking?! In the middle of the night, I’m awakened by the silence, never has the sound of silence been so loud—like a film with no audio, strangely cool. In the morning the mist riddles its way through the countless limestone statues as it has for thousands of years and we hike to the elevated look out of the popular island Ti Top.

We’re on the mainland by noon and heading back to Hanoi for a little urban afternoon (shops and fine dining) before we fly in the morning to central Vietnam. The history is complicated. First the Chinese, then the French, followed by the Americans and locally there were the Cham conflicts, VC and villagers and the Royal Vietnam Government—you need one massive org chart for the history and the boarded keeps moving—by 1975 most things started to settle down and the Vietnamese are very proudly independent and… Vietnamese.

Hue, and Hoi An offer bite size experiences into Vietnamese history, culture and the discipline of survival. Hue, the larger of the two, asserts itself with the Citadel and volunteer woman’s army, The Forbidden Purple City, Temple and Palace, in addition to its picturesque boulevards and sculpture gardens initiated by the French. Just outside Hue, are the villages making incense and the famous Conical hats, which we passed on our way to the tomb of the Kings. Another day and a sunny drive along the Vietnamese beach coast past the numerous new ‘resorts’ under development and up over the mountain pass riddled with both French and American bomb shelters—it’s an ongoing landscape of juxtaposed stories. We visited Marble Mountain—great caves with Buddha’s and by early afternoon were lunching riverside in the pedestrian only centre of Hoi An. Lovely.

Hoi An was most excited that evening as Vietnam won the soccer semi-finals—scooters raged the streets with enthusiastic flag waving fans. The village on the edge of the sea has been a trading post for centuries, covered bridges, merchant homes and silk weavers keep history alive with healthy tourism today. As the party in the street died down and the last few flags motored back home we were ready to hit the hay… with early morning pastries on our mind (as they are rumored to be the best) we happily settled in for a nice long snooze.