Fishing and farming

We left Hanoi for the coast to spend some time in Halong Bay. The weather turned cool and misty which is disappointing. We drove through a lot of farm land of rice paddies and vegetable cultivation. The planting of rice is just getting underway in the northern area. There are a lot of healthy looking salad crops in the fields - a farmer can expect the equivalent of half a dollar for a kilo of lettuce in the market. On the journey we also saw a lot of construction - quite a few big housing developments with no one in them. It is the usual issue - houses but no schools and shops so people don't want to move there. We passed through a coal mining area and saw 2-3 big power stations. It was fairly industrialised in large parts.

We stopped at what can be described as a place of sheltered employment for disabled young people. According to Thong, there are still many casualties of the American War with a fairly high incidence of children and grandchildren of war vets having birth defects. Disability is not really understood in the society so such children would normally be isolated and hidden from public view. An old soldier has set up a charity to develop training and work opportunities for such young people. They practise the traditional crafts of lacquered wood products, jewellery making,silk embroidered pictures, making clothes and bags and making stone and onyx sculptures.

Halong Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage sight and is special because of the landscape of around 2,000 pinnacle shaped limestone and dolomite outcrops scattered across the bay. Cappadocia in the sea. We joined our boat which was our overnight home to sail around part of the bay. We had a couple of excursions during our 22 hours aboard. We went by small boat around a floating fishing village where there are 500 residents in about 134 houses. They have a school and 2 nurses who stay there 5 days in a week. The people fish and take their catches to the market on the mainland so they can get money to buy their other food and essentials. We also visited a cave which was home to Stone Age inhabitants of Vietnam.

We had an early morning trek up a hill for a misty view! The boat was great with a sauna and massage treatments available. There was a good mix of fellow passengers - Mexican, Aussie, French, Americans and us. We learned how to make Vietnamese Spring Rolls and ate some lovely food. We were trading stories about what our guides had told us - one guide was very much 'according to the party line' but another was more like our Thong. The Americans felt comfortable and didn't feel that they were being held accountable for past atrocities.

There is also a big business in cultured pearl production in the bay and nearby river for sea water and fresh water pearls. They showed us what they use instead of a grain of sand to encourage the oyster to produce the pearl - ground up oyster shell formed into a small ball. It takes 3 years for a sea water pearl to develop and only one year for the freshwater pearl. In the fresh water shell there can be 4-5 pearls but only one in the sea water shell.