From our boat, we slowly moved towards the Cong Dam floating village. We had several row boats; each boat had two passengers and was driven by a local lady from the village. We moved slowly and in a close cluster so we could hear our guide Smiley occasionally told us about something to note.

As we get closer to the village, Smiley told us to wear the hat given by our boat rower. I wasn’t sure the reason why, if it was part of protocol or simply just to help protect us from getting wet as it started drizzling, but we went ahead and followed the direction.

As we rode our boats slowly through the village and observed the life that’s going on in the village, I couldn’t help not to compare what I saw here to what we saw in the Chong Kneas floating village on Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia few days before.

The two floating villages were roughly the same size; Cong Dam might’ve been a little smaller than Chong Kneas. People in both villages lived from fishing, Chong Kneas lived off fresh water fish from the largest lake in Southeast Asia, while Cong Dam had salt water fish from Ha Long Bay. Both started to benefit more from tourism, with Cong Dam having the advantage of being in a very beautiful natural setting of Ha Long Bay. Another big difference was that the people in Ha Long Bay have been there for a long time, while those in Chong Kneas were essentially illegal immigrants from Vietnam who have to compete with the locals.

In either case, I wonder what they think of the tourists who come and visit their village. I would compare that to a situation if somehow the neighborhood where I’ve lived for a long time suddenly becoming a tourist attraction. For some, it might be annoying, while others might welcome that for its potential economic benefits.

I took the photo below as we’re about to approach the village. You can see our boats and the village just in front of us.

Del and Jerry are siblings from the United States who were in our Ha Long Bay tour group. They were at the end of their two-week long trip in Vietnam visiting Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and Ha Long Bay.

Del was a pediatric surgeon who also taught at a medical school and gave workshops in many developing countries, so she traveled frequently. She had been to Vietnam before for work, but this time she wanted to travel for leisure with her brother. Jerry was a geography professor. He didn’t travel as much as his sister, but being in the geography field he knew quite a bit about places including Vietnam.

During the trip we shared the dining table with them during the meals, so we had some good conversations with them. It seemed that they had a nice time to spend with each other during this trip, perhaps a rare opportunity given their hectic professional schedules.

Here was Del and Jerry on their row boat during our visit to the Cong Dam floating village.

One of the most vocal and lively members of our Ha Long Bay tour group was a lady named Mrs. Hoa. She’s a Vietnamese lady who married an American and then lived in Idaho, USA. She came with her son, two daughters, and their husbands. She was originally from Hoi An area in Vietnam, but in this trip she also wanted to visit many other areas in Vietnam.

It was interesting to observe her and her entourage during the trip. She was very outgoing and pretty much spoke her mind whenever she saw or experienced something. In many cases it provided somewhat a funny interaction, especially when she had conversations and joked around with our guide Smiley who also had quite an outgoing personality. The other interesting interaction was with her son-in-law David, who had his Canon DSLR camera and took photos of everything he found interesting, kind of like the stereotype of Japanese tourists with cameras.

I thought it must be nice for her to be able to come back to her home country, accompanied by her grown up children and in-laws and to be able to share with them the experience that they might not have before back home in the United States. It’s also not something that most Vietnamese immigrants elsewhere could do; I know of many Vietnamese in the United States who had never been able to come back home since they left their home country decades ago.

I took the photo below from our boat as we passed Mrs. Hoa and David’s boat. Here was Mrs. Hoa trying to row the boat, and her son-in-law taking the photos of this interesting moment.