Toward the end of our kayaking session in Ha Long Bay, we saw on a distance another group of kayaks coming from a different direction. Clearly we’re not alone at this part of Ha Long Bay. We kept a little distance to avoid the kayaks colliding with each other, but both groups seemed to be heading to the same direction. I was too busy to keep our kayak moving straight given our rudder problem, so I kept on rowing until Kristi told me to look up. We saw in the distance in front of us several junk boats including a couple of them that looked like ours moored near an island, and all of the kayaks seemed to be going towards the beach on the little island.

We navigated past the junk boats and reached the sandy beach on the island. A couple of folks helped us getting to the shore; I recognized some of them were our crew from Dragon’s Pearl junkboat. It turned out that the island was a private island owned by the Indochina Junk Co., and all of the boats around us were their boat. The island was one of the stops for all of the boats as it provided them with a chance to relax on the beach a little bit, as well as to visit a cave on the island.

Kristi and I ended up walking around a little bit on the island to check out the scenery. It was low tide time, so we could see some of the rocks exposed. That’s a good thing, as we were not wearing our sandals at that point and could’ve hurt our feet walking on those rocks.

After spending some time there, the crew called us to get on the tender that would take us back to our junk boat so we could rest a little bit and get cleaned up before dinner time.

The photo below was taken as we’re approaching the island. You can see the junk boats moored close to the beach.

After a hearty lunch, we continued our second day experience in Ha Long Bay with another session of kayaking. Our tour guide Smiley said that it would be a longer trip than the first session. Instead of going somewhere and then coming back to the junk boat, on this second trip we were dropped off a location, and from there we would follow our junk boat from a distance as we’re heading to our next stop in Ha Long Bay.

This time around we knew a little better on how to row and steer our kayak after practising in the first session the day before. However, the water was not as calm as the day before, so we had to work harder on keeping the pace with the group. After going for a while, we noticed that somehow the kayak was more difficult to keep moving straight; it kept veering to the right. I thought it was simply because of the wind or the waves that we had to fight, until one of the other kayakers came next to us and told us that our rudder was down to one side, so that’s why it kept veering off and we couldn’t go straight. The line for controlling the rudder was broken, so we couldn’t really adjust it or take the rudder off ourselves. The other kayakers were nice enough to help reach out rudder and manually flipped it off so it’s not engaged and we could go straight again. That worked well for a while, until the group started moving fast again and going through rougher waters. At that point, somehow the rudder engaged again and we couldn’t control it, so for the rest of the trip we had to put extra effort to keep correcting the bearing of the kayak.

The photo below was taken during a break in the middle of the kayak ride. Smiley was nice enough to offer to take photos of us from his kayak. You can see the little white piece at the stern of our kayak — that the little rudder that made us put extra effort to steer the kayak during this ride.

We had two fellow travelers in our Ha Long Bay cruise group named David. Both of them were part of Mrs. Hoa’s group; one was her son (whom we called Dave) and another one was her son-in-law (whom we called David to distinguish him from his brother-in-law). Compared to the everyone else in the group Dave seemed to be somewhat different; he wasn’t as outgoing or as lively, and I noticed that he spent some of the times alone carrying his big backpack. From the logo on the backpack (Lowepro), I knew it was a camera bag, and sure enough he had quite an arsenal of photography equipment with him.

I didn’t interact at all with Dave during the first day of the trip, but at the beginning of the second day, we were both up quite early trying to catch the sunrise. It turned out to be a cloudy day and we didn’t get as nice of shots as we were hoping for, but we did have some nice conversation that morning. It started similarly to my conversation with a couple whom we met in Sapa, with talking about our photography equipment. Dave also used Canon equipment, so he recognized the lens I had on my DSLR (the 24-70mm f/2.8 L with its recognizable red ring) and mentioned that I had a very nice lens to shoot with. He had many lenses along with him in his big backpack, including another ‘workhorse’ Canon lens model, the 70-200mm L lens (the big white lens with the red ring).

We continued our conversations also the next day on the way back to Ha Long City. It was interesting to hear that while it was fun to travel with his family to his mom’s home country of Vietnam, his primary reason for traveling was to take photos to add to his portfolio. He started getting into professional photography. He wasn’t quite to the point that he could make it a full-time job, but he wanted to continue building his portfolio and the trip to Vietnam and Cambodia was perfect for that. I checked out his website later on, and sure enough he had some very nice photos there. Some photos were recognizable from our trip in Ha Long Bay.

The photo below was taken while we were at the Cong Dam floating village. Here was Dave concentrating to take photos on the village life right in front of him.