You know Hạ Long Bay. Maybe not by name, but by iconic representation. It’s like Bayon Temple in Cambodia. The name probably causes a puzzled look, but once you see a picture of those massive Buddha heads, you know exactly what you’re looking at.

So it is with Hạ Long Bay. “Oh, that place. I didn’t know its name.” Well, you do now. Isn’t this educational.

That scraped photo tells the full story of Hạ Long Bay. It’s an iconic UNESCO World Heritage site, known for its unique limestone karst outcroppings, and it is positively acrawl with tourists. In fact, it’s pretty clear that if you were on one of those boats, your primary view would be of other boats.

The problem with iconic, bucket list locales is that they tend to be overrun. That’s why visiting El Jem, the Roman colosseum in Tunisia, obviated the need to ever visit the Colosseum in Rome. We’ve aged out of the mosh pit.

Hạ Long Bay is in the Gulf of Tonkin, helping fill in our American Colonialist World Tour bingo card (box #1 was snorkeling in the Bay of Pigs). As it happens, the Gulf of Tonkin is also home to two other bays, one of which, Lan Ha Bay, abuts Hạ Long Bay and shares its geomorphology. All the half a billion year old limestone karsts, pretty much none of the tourists. It enjoys less tourist infrastructure than Hạ Long Bay, but that’s fine. That’s why there are fewer tourists. It’s not like we’re five-star travelers.

Day One

Home base for most Lan Ha Bay tours is Cát Bà Island, and we arranged a four day/three night visit. Actually getting to Cát Bà is a multi-step process. The bus from Hà Nội gets you close, but then you have to catch a ferry to the island and pick up another bus to the hotel. We worked with a local Cát Bà agency that made the arrangements, so we were guided through all of our transfers and changes. Sweet.

Cát Bà Town, the largest city on the island, is in the middle of a pretty furious makeover. The entire waterfront is a construction zone, getting a Green Tourism facelift that won’t be completed until sometime in 2026. Promised amenities include a desalinization plant, rainwater and wastewater processing, green spaces, a new beach, electric cable cars and trams, ecotourism resorts, and a golf course. Because nothing screams sustainability like a golf course.

We arrived to our hotel at about noon and had some time to kick around Cát Bà Town before our evening tour, so we strolled the modest sights.

But the main event for Day One was a twilight tour of the bay, dinner aboard, and then a kayak trip after dark to view the bioluminescent plankton. Yes, please.

As it turns out, I knew a little something about both glowy sea bits and kayaks. When I was 13 and traveling the Americas with my parents, one of our stops was in Guadalajara, which boasts shoreline bioluminescent plankton and a long, shallow shelf at the beach. As I recollect you could walk out almost a quarter mile and never get above your knees, while trailing blue-green fairy lights behind you with each step. There aren’t that many places on the planet that feature bioluminescence, so this tour was an. easy decision. It would be a first for Dorothy.

Getting there by kayak, though, not so much. I had been in a kayak, once before in my life, and it ended badly. Any experience that ends in a rescue, I think, counts as ending badly. So I hadn’t been in a kayak in over fifty years, and Dorothy had never been in a kayak. What better way to manage our collective fears than in the dark?

Before that, though, we had a lovely late afternoon cruise to see the Bay’s highlights.

That cued up the whole point of the cruise: them glowy plankton. Of which I have next to no documentation. Here’s the thing about kayaking at night in the middle of an unlit bay: it’s dark. Too-dark-for-pictures dark. Here’s pretty much the only proof I have that this wasn’t a fever dream.

What you can’t see in that photo is that we’re actually tied to the guide’s kayak in front of us. No way to drift away, which, once Dorothy was able to successfully get into the kayak, allayed most of the remaining fears. Let the plankton hunting begin.

But these were not the plankton of my Guadalajaran youth. Those critters had a blue-green color and a slow decay. Once agitated, they’d glow for a few moments before fading out, which is what led to the fairy trails in the water. The Lan Ha plankton glowed white, with a sharp decay, so they were like little lights that came on and blinked right out. You’d agitate them with an oar and they’d flick on for a moment. Which made taking a picture, given the absence of ambient light, impossible.

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to capture them in the boat’s wake on the way back to dock, which turned out to be their most spectacular expression. Way better than the minimal violence that an oar can inflict.

Day Two

Day Two was a full-day, eight hour cruise that left the dock at 8:00 AM. We’d be doing a much more thorough tour of the Bay than our evening cruise, including a kayaking run through caves, monkey hunting, a visit to a fishing research station, a stop for swimming, and lunch.

The Hạ Long/Lan Ha/Cát Bà area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. Since then, the government has taken actions to preserve that status, as UNESCO has benchmarks you have to hit in order to keep your listing. In the case of Lan Ha Bay, that meant cleaning up the floating village. Suddenly, good hygiene was in and throwing your trash overboard and shitting in the Bay were out.

The floating villages have been consolidated into one area not far from the dock. It’s pretty much one of the first things you see on the tour. People still live on the water and make their living there, just with more constraints from the government than they had pre-UNESCO. Our guide grew up in the floating village, and his father still lives there.

I have a ginchy new glass lens for my iPhone camera that takes anamorphic photos in something closer to a cinematic aspect ratio. But to truly get a feel for the scope of the Bay, I think this might be better.

The landscape reminded me, in an odd way, of the Lake District in England, which I visited once when working at DC Comics. Steve Parkhouse, who was illustrating The Hiding Place for my Piranha Press imprint, lived in the Lake District and drove me about for a tour. At one point we stopped on the crest of a hill and got out. The vista below was iconic to a fault.

Rolling green hills, ancient stone fences crisscrossing the fields, sheep dotted about in a particularly fetching pattern, and a little stream bubbling out of the ground near us and tumbling down to the valley below. If you close your eyes and think of England, which is how I get through the scary parts, that view will be what you see.

Beatrix Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien had both been Lake District residents, and it all made sense. They suddenly seemed less like fantasists and more like creative documentarians. I’d have been utterly unsurprised to see a hobbit come out from behind a rock or Peter Cottontail bounding across a field. Of course they wrote those stories. What else could they do?

Lan Ha Bay, in a less refined way, elicited a similar response. Neither a swarm of pterodactyls nor a giant ape would have been a surprise in that landscape, which looked decidedly like The Land That Time Forgot. I’d bet money that it wasn’t a case of the filmmakers scouting locations and finding Lan Ha/Hạ Long as it was one of them going there and coming up with the idea for Kong: Skull Island on the spot.

There isn’t a lot of culturally significant commentary to offer about this next slideshow. It’s just nature, at its awesome, atavistic best. Enjoy.

Here’s a little of what the islands feel like up close.

We had been surprised that the clientele for both of our boat tours trended so young. We’d thought of the kind of off-the-beaten-track adventure we were on as more suited economically to the retirement cohort, but we’d overlooked how cheap this kind of travel is, and how very, very active it turned out to be. There was a reason we were the oldest people on the tours: we simply hadn’t done the math.

It all started to make sense when we set off on the putative highlight of the day: the afternoon kayak trip around the Bay and through the caves. We’d managed our first kayak adventure in the dark, so we figured a daylight run would be a piece of cake. But you know that thing where your trainer is all, “Dude, don’t do two arm days in a row.” We did two arm days in a row.

Our nighttime trek had been an hour of paddling, but we didn’t know what exactly we’d agreed to for the following day. It seems we’d signed up for two hours, over three kilometers, and several days of recovery. I believe I documented Dorothy’s quote verbatim: “I never want to work that hard to have fun again.” I second that emotion.

Jesus. All this travel has made me hate America (more), hate the French (more), and now, I even hate men and their junk. I am a self-hating junk owner. Is there anything sadder? Sure, I guess. Being the kind of mook who’d rub ground up monkey on their junk in a desperate attempt to feel something, anything. That’s rock fucking bottom.

Halfway through the tour we had to be lashed to our guide’s kayak again, like the previous night. We were falling behind. I don’t think he was literally dragging us, but it was easier to keep pace attached. We dragged ourselves back to the boat for a very welcome, very sedentary, very necessary lunch break.

Our guide, Ryan, had been poking me since the previous day’s tour, when he tried to get me to jump into the water from the second floor of the boat. I declined, while noting for his benefit that I was immune to peer pressure. Ever since my second rescue from the top of a pyramid, I’d committed to heeding my inside voice whenever it said, “I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t.” More people should try that. You just know, you meet some people and think, “Oh, that person has never once in their lives said ‘Maybe I shouldn’t.'”

So Ryan backflipped into the water from the second floor as if, somehow, that would convince me. It did, in a way.

It convinced me to walk down to the first floor and enter the water from the ladder. For good measure, I donned a life jacket. Sure, we were near a beach, but in water way too deep to stand in.

Which turned out to be a great decision, as that water was way colder than I expected. I jumped in all at once and my heart did that thing it does after an especially thick line of blow. You know. Threatening to burst. I’d had some thought, on entering the water, of swimming to Screaming Island’s beach. Which somehow looked much closer from the boat than it did from the water. I immediately pivoted to my newly hatched Plan B: survive.

To be fair, I was adjusting to the water temperature. Alternatively, I was dying and could no longer feel anything. Not caring to settle that definitively, I paddled the couple of feet back to the ladder and hauled myself to safety. Dorothy was relieved to know that she could skip the swimming experience without regrets. I’m always happy to take one for the team. Especially when I survive.

That left one more stop on our way back to the dock: the fishing research station. This was basically a small floating village that had been converted to research and development. They raised fish there for two purposes. To use them to produce fish eggs, and to try different methods to keep the fish healthy for as long as possible. Their charges were all long-term residents.

What it led to, though, was very large fish. Like, really large fish.

Somehow, as an Official Guide, Ryan had permission to feed them.

These guys had a net on the top, as well, as they’d been known to get excited and leap to freedom.

And that was it. Eight hours on the Bay, and sore was the worst thing that happened. We’re winners!

Day Three: A Leg Day!

We wanted this day to be pretty chill, given how intensely physical we’d found the kayaking. Cát Bà had a couple of modest-sized but notable caves not far from Cát Bà Town, so we hired us a driver for a few hours and took off. First stop: Hospital Cave.

The stairway is new, of course. As designed, access was via a wooden stairway that could be pulled up in case of attack. Which never happened. The facility was so well hidden the Americans never figured out it existed. Stupid Americans.

The complex is an impressive feat of engineering, comprising over 20,000 square feet across three floors, with 17 rooms and a capacity of 100 patients. The facility boasted fresh water, ventilation, and a secondary escape route, in the event of a breach.

The first floor was storerooms, offices, wards, and operatories, all built of concrete. The second floor was a gathering area in a large natural cavern, used for exercise and movies. It even had a small swimming pool. The third floor, which isn’t open to the public, was a bolthole in the event that senior officials needed to go to ground, although I don’t know that it was ever used for that purpose. That floor included its own separate escape route.

Our final stop of the day, and of the visit, was Trung Trang Cave. Unlike Hospital Cave, whose interests were primarily historical, Trung Trang offered the more traditional cave virtues of cool limestone formations. However, like Hospital Cave, it required an ascent to reach. What’s up with all the caves at the top of mountains? Who does that?

I’ll confess that I’m kind of a cave slut. You don’t even have to be the most beautiful, most spectacular example of cavedom. I will still spelunk you. Assuming there’s a paved pathway. Jesus, what do you take me for?

I think it all goes back to family car trips in the Southwest. Carlsbad Caverns was always my favorite stop, and I think reading Journey To The Centre Of The Earth at a tender, impressionable age sealed the deal. “How old were you when you first had these feelings?” Indeed.

All of which is to say that Trung Trang is not the prettiest cave at the dance, but I shall happily twirl her about the floor with reckless abandon and extol her manifest virtues to all who will listen. She is a cave, and that is enough.

She was also a lovely, low-key way to wind up the trip. Except for all the ascending.