Category Archives: Culture

Floating Village in the Bay

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After we finished our breakfast, our tour guide Smiley told us to get ready to meet up on the upper deck before we started our second day in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, with a visit to one of the floating villages in the bay. There are four floating villages in Ha Long Bay area, with a population of around 1,600 people total living there. Most are fishermen and their families. The villages are located in sheltered coves at the base of mountainous islands. The islands provide a natural protection from bad weather condition especially during the typhoon season. These communities have been inhabiting the area for quite a long time. They still live mainly from fishing, selling their catch to the nearby Ha Long City where they also get their supplies. Now with the increasing popularity of tourism in the area, the villages are also opening up for visits from tourists. Some even provided special events for tourists who come to visit.

I didn’t have much expectation about what we would experience through this visit. One thing I was interested in finding out was the comparison between these floating villages to the ones we saw in Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia. Obvious difference was that one was in fresh water lake while the other is in a bay close to open sea. Both live on fishing, but other thand that, I guess we would find out.

I took the photo below when we were about to enter the village. You could see here two of the tourists on a row boat, and the row of houses that made up one side of the floating village.

Floating village

Pho Ga

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After spending some time out in the cold trying to take photos of the sunrise at Ha Long Bay, I went back to my cabin to get ready for the day. By then Kristi was already up as well, and we went to the dining room afterwards to meet others for breakfast.

The breakfast for the day was a traditional Vietnamese dish, pho ga (chicken noodle soup). For many of the passengers, it was unusual to have noodle soup for breakfast, but in Vietnam they pretty much serve pho all day long, and some would have it for breakfast. Coming from Indonesia, Kristi and I were also used to having noodle dishes for breakfast. I guess it must be a Southeast Asian or Chinese thing.

Since we arrived in Vietnam few days before, we’ve been constantly moving that we had not had the chance to try out pho, the Vietnamese dish that is well-known and available everywhere. So here was our first pho in Vietnam during this trip. The serving was pretty small in comparison to the portion they serve in the US, but it was just about the right amount; it was filling without making me feel bloated. And after being out in the cold for the morning, having the warm soup dish was definitely perfect for the occasion.

You can see on the photo below my bowl of pho. It was not that big but quite packed with chicken meat, noodles, and some greens.

Pho ga

Mantis Prawn

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After a long day that started very early in the morning at the train station in Hanoi and ended with kayaking in Ha Long Bay, Kristi and I were quite wiped out. We had a couple of hours of free, rest time that we took advantage of by taking a short nap in our nice cabin on the junk boat.

After the nice nap and freshening up, we joined other passengers in the dining room for dinner. After opening the trip with a feast for the lunch, I thought they had set high expectations for the meal that would be difficult to top. I was wrong. The dinner was actually equally if not more impressive than the lunch. The menu for dinner was as follows: kohlrabi salad with herbs to start, folled by deep-fried roll with herms, fried mantis prawn with salt and lemongrass, steamed crab with rose wine, sauted prawn with garlic butter, deep-fried chicken with read wine, grilled mackerel fish on hot pan, Ha Long fish cake with herbs, fried vegetables with garlic, steamed rice, and again fresh tropical fruit to close. Another impressive spread for a meal.

The highlight of the meal was the mantis prawn. When I was planning for this trip, I watched an episode of Bizarre Foods show on Travel Channel where Andrew Zimmern went to Ha Long Bay and tried some interesting dishes local to the area. The best one he had was the mantis prawn, which he described as a cross between two decadent seafoods, lobster and crab meat. I was wondering if we would have an opportunity to try it, and here it was, added to the menu in the last minute. It was prepared in a simple recipe, sauteed with salt and lemongrass. They looked quite strange as they resemble praying mantis — pretty scary looking. But the dish smelled so good, and Smiley and other Dragon Pearl’s crew encouraged us to try this as it’s the delicacy of the region. They helped us to peel the prawn; we had to be a little careful as there were sharp edges on the shell and the prawn’s legs. Andrew Zimmern was right about how delicious the mantis prawn meat is — it was among the best dishes I had in this trip (quite a distinction given that we had many excellent meals during this trip in Southeast Asia).

That was a great way to end the first day of our cruise in Ha Long Bay. Some of the passengers watched as our boat’s captain went out in the dark and tried to catch some squid. It was pretty neat, but after seeing one caught, the novelty kind of wore off and the exhaustion set in. Most of the passengers retreated to their respective cabins to end the day with a good night sleep.

You can see on the photo below me holding a mantis prawn in my hand before deshelling and eating it. Notice the size of it and its mantis-like look.

Eating mantis prawn

Fresh Seafood

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After getting a chance to enjoy the view of the surroundings at the start of our cruise in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, we heard the bell for lunch. It’s definitely a welcomed sound, as it’s been a long day for most of us after spending the morning on a drive from Hanoi to Ha Long City, and then followed with boarding the junk boat. Kristi and I went to the dining room, and in a few minutes all of the other passengers made it there as well.

Smiley our tour guide welcomed us again, and informed us that the meals that we would have during the cruise are as important experience as the sightseeing and other activities we would do. He said the crew would like to ensure that we enjoy the food and drinks they serve, so any request or feedback we had were welcomed. The food was included as part of our cruise package, but the drinks were not. So they would keep tab of what we ordered, and at the end of the trip we would settle the bill with them.

For the first meal of our trip, Smiley said we would have several dishes featuring seafood freshly gathered from Ha Long Bay itself. The food was served family style at each table. The menu for this first meal was as follows: red bean and lotus seed soup as as starter, followed by green vegetable salad with carrot juice, Ha Long clam with fragrance smooth fruit, deep fried prawn with garlic and butter, Vong Vieng oyster cake with garlic sauce, steamed fish with soy sauce, fried vegetable with garlic, steamed rice, and closed with fresh tropical fruits. Quite a meal to make a first impression. Most of the dishes were very familiar to me and Kristi, as they were probably closer to traditional Chinese preparation than what we knew as Vietnamese food. But it makes sense since where we were in northern Vietnam was very close to the southern Chinese border, and historically there were a lot of Chinese influence in the Vietnamese culture.

The photo below was the deep-fried prawn with garlic and butter dish. It’s a pretty simple preparation; the highlight was the prawn that clearly was very fresh. I also like this preparation better than the deep-fried shrimp we find in the US; it’s more tasty, and didn’t feel greasy at all.

Deep-fried prawns

Calm Waters

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After we settled in our cabin, we had some free time before lunch time to start our cruise in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. Our junk boat slowly moved out the crowded port area towards the labyrinth of passageways among the thousands of rocks and isles in Ha Long Bay that made the place famous. We started following what looked like a main route to get to the open seas, so we saw many other boats, big and small. But eventually we would turn to a less crowded route, and not long after it seemed that we were alone in a quiet inlet.

Kristi and I went to the upper deck level of the boat to enjoy the scenery. It was colder than we expected, but I suppose it’s because we were in winter season as well. We just didn’t associate coastal Vietnam with cold before. Fortunately we had our gears ready since we just came from the mountainous region of Sapa. For a moment it was really nice to just stay quiet and enjoy the calm waters around with the surreal landscape around that looked like it came out of paintings or pictures that we’ve seen so many times. Then I thought about an article I read during the trip planning that talked about tourists had this iddylic picture in their head, only to be confronted with the reality that many others also had the same idea, and you end up having to enjoy the panorama with thousand other people on many other boats next to yours. Fortunately our tour company was true to their words as they mentioned that our particular cruise was supposed to be ‘off the beaten path’ and it would take us to areas that are less crowded and more secluded.

The photo below was taken from the top deck of our boat as we cruised out towards the rocks and isles of Ha Long Bay. You can see the layers of rocks and isles in front of us, and also a big ship going towards the open sea.

Cruising in Ha Long Bay