Before we start, here is the Google Photos album of the cruise!
My tips for the cruise:
- Bring water and hide it in your bag. According to Eric, you are not allowed to bring your own water bottles on the boat, but they will not check your bags, so do it!
- Bring warm clothes, i.e. winter clothes. I ended up freezing on this cruise - especially at night - because I only wore a sweater and golf pants. I should have worn proper pants and a jacket in order to not freeze.
I was supposed to leave from my hostel around 8 am to get on a bus for the Rosa Cruises Halong Bay cruise. I waited for more than half an hour and saw everyone else leave for their cruises before I asked someone in the hostel staff if they knew anything about my cruise. Ten minutes later, a woman entered the hostel, guided me and sat me down in a bus full of elderly couples. Crap was the thought that went through my head for a couple minutes until the last two guests - two Australian girls in my age - entered the bus. Thank God, the trip was saved… I was not going to be the baby of the trip!
On the trip to the cruise, I talked to an American couple in their 40’s who were super liberal. They lived in a very liberal city in the very conservative state New Carolina, worked as a therapist and an art’s teacher, respectively, and seemed quite open-minded about drugs. We had a quite interesting talk about American politics from their point of view, and even though we have quite different opinions and viewpoints of life, I ended up liking them!
We drove for about one and a half hours to then stop at a strategically put out shop for us to buy stuff and go to the restroom. Then we continued for about two hours more before we got onto the boat. Quickly, we got handed our room keys, installed ourselves in our rooms which were nicely decorated and equipped with a big double bed, a shower, a sink with a tap and a toilet.
Soon thereafter, we walked to the boat roof, took some nice pictures of the bay, talked for a few minutes before it was time for lunch.
The lunch was a big delicious buffet in which the boat staff came with a steady stream of delicious food for 5-10 minutes. It was a great lunch, and we could not finish all the food they had put out on our tables. What was great, was that every meal on this boat was like this!
After lunch, we headed for the local pearl farm, where a nice lady showed us through the process of farming pearls from oysters. It was quite an interesting tour, where we saw different species of oysters, nets filled with these oysters, oyster doctors and, lastly, a store filled with pearl jewellery where I could begin my search for the most expensive piece of jewellery seen during the trip. I think the most expensive one was a pearl necklace worth 236,000,000 Dong (ca 8,660 EUR).
After the farm, we went to a canoe place, where I and Anil the Indian solo travelling guy rowed together in the sunset. We were not as athletic as the others, and instead ended up floating still and talking with the Australian girls Lucy and Laura. They seemed cheerful and down to earth, and I have to say that Lucy is probably the funniest girl I have ever met! If you somehow end up seeing this, know that I think you should consider a career in stand-up comedy! Anyways, the photo below is from a fellow traveller on the boat, Viraj Kulkarni. A quite nice sunset, I have to say!
After canoeing, we went to a place where we could swim. I had heard about the water having a layer of plastics under the surface, so I was skeptic at first. I, however, got persuaded by our tour guide and therefore dove from upper deck into the water, where I could feel the gooey bottom with my feet. It turns out that plastics was not the thing to worry about; it was the muddy bottom. The water was warm though, compared to the air, which made Lucy and a dutch guy swim around the boat while I was in the shower to warm myself up.
After our little swim, it began to get dark quite quickly, and soon thereafter, we anchored 50 meters from an octopus fish boat (if you have not seen one before, they shine a big amount of spotlights on the water surface to attract octopodes (yes, correct plural form of octopus)) and had a few drinks at the boat rooftop. Apparently Laura and Lucy are studying medicine in Perth and they were now waiting for their grades for their finals, which they have once per year. Apparently, you have to redo the entire year if you fail these exams…
After drinks, we had dinner, and I sat in the same table as the super liberal Americans and the elderly Danish couple (who I think were a bit conservative). The Danish guy turned out to have worked at Lund University Hospital as a consultants a few times. Meanwhile, the american couple joked about how people react to different drugs. Interesting dynamics you stumble upon sometimes…
After the dinner, the girls, cheerful as they were, got us all to sing karaoke (yes, they had it on the boat, like everywhere else here in Asia). Funnily enough, the Australian girls asked where Abba are from, to which the Danish couple responded with eagerly pointing at me. It was a fun hour, and afterwards we played a game where everyone had to say a word in their own language that the others had to guess what it means; a game in which I found out that the Swedish expression “ska vi bolla lite idéer” is widely inappropriate in Danish, and might lead you to a more romantic kind of brainstorming with a dane than you first intended. Fun facts aside, this turned out to be a better trip than my expectations, and I went to bed happy that night!
Next day, we woke up around 6 am to do a Tai Chi session in the sunrise with the boat captain. It sounds a lot better than it was, and if I had done it again, I would have slept through this. The sunrise was not impressive, as we were parked behind a mountain island, and the tai chi session felt like 30 minutes worth of imitating a penguin in antarctic winter. We were all quite happy when it ended and we could go down and get warm and eat a big and delicious breakfast.
Next up, we split our group, because some cruise members were going on a 3 days, 2 nights cruise. My group now went to a stalactite cave called Hang Sung Sot in one of the mountain islands, along with hundreds of other tourists from other cruise ships. It was an impressive and big cave, but it had been very exploited by tourism - something we noticed first hand as we walked through it.
When we had walked through the caves, Viraj Kulkarni the Canadian/Indian guy who works in Hong Kong lit up brighter than Kim Jong Un’s experimental fireworks when he saw a girl right by the cave’s exit. Apparently they had met on this exact same boat cruise three years ago and this was the first time they met since then. Afterwards, Lucy and Laura thanked him sincerely for letting them witness this moment of pure and crystallized happiness. Following this trail of events, their only logical conclusion was that we would all most likely meet each other on this cruise in three years again, now that we were soon to part from each other.
Before we parted, however, we had to take a lot of group photos and video clips of ourselves on our cruise back to the shore. We also screamed our lungs out at a neighboring boat; partly because Lucy and Laura’s friend was there, partly because their life boat was floating away from their ship.
A few hours later, we had gotten off our boat, taken a bus for a couple of hours, taken a break at another conveniently placed shop, taken another hour of bus riding, and then parted.
Doing a solo trip like this, you realize that the people you meet along the way will probably never reenter your life. It is a more social way of travelling, as you meet a lot of new people, but at the same time these will most likely not be kept when you get back home. You have more freedom to choose what you want to do throughout the trip, but at the same time, the solo trip becomes more restricted as you cannot divide the responsibility for your safety and plans between travelling buddies. It is an interesting way of travelling, and I can definitely understand why so many choose to do solo backpacking - especially in Asia, with its richness in culture, nature and food. At the same time, the solo backpacking trip can be lonely, stressful (because of safety concerns) and unsafe. I certainly experienced the former two of these, but luckily managed to avoid the third one, as Lombok had taught me to never forget my credit card in a foreign country.
All in all, I am very happy I decided to go on this last trip, as it let me experience the solo trip along with one of Asia’s most rewarding countries - both culturally, food-wise and nature-wise. It also let me be completely self-dependent in a very foreign country. Concluding, I recommend trying a solo trip sometime!
Lastly, here is a photo from Viraj Kulkarni of the boat. It is nice to have good photographers with you on your trips!
