Ha Long Bay is about a halfday drive from Hanoi. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is approximately 49 billion islands (ha ha - don't expect me to verify that!) of limestone karst formations. They crop up all over SE Asia, you see them in southern China (and in traditional Chinese paintings) here and throughout northern Vietnam, as well as over to Thailand. These particular formations were formed by a couple of dragons. On my tour I went to see the cave where they used to live, those dragons. Most people were smart enough to leave the dragons alone, but one day, quite some time ago I am told, the intrepid Chinese army was pondering the plundering of this part of the world, and one resourceful Vietnamese fisherman took a boat to the island and woke the dragons just for kicks. Well the dragons were in a Monday-morning mood, and were annoyed by everything, specifically the Chinese navy messing about in their bay, so they flew around spitting fire until the intruders left. The fire they spit hit water and, viola eureka and habedashery, became the funny looking mountains you see in this photo.
Fortunately the dragons don't bother tourists, maybe they taste funny. In any case, there are a lot of tourists. Here you can see the floating house of the village elder on the left (with the VN flag on it) with a couple of tourist boats docked there for the tourists to hop on a small boat and go through a tunnel under one of those mountains.
Halong Bay is one of those places where you can't help taking a lot of photos, but looking at the photos is not really comparable to actually seeing it. I guess that's why there are so many tourists! Anyway, more photos:
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