As I write this, it was yesterday that we took our boat trip in Halong Bay. It is a very special place and deserving of its UNESCO badge, but…
We were lucky. In the morning it was still very misty, but unlike the day we arrived, there were clear signs that the sun was trying to break through, it did. Although the mist and haze never did fully clear. The haze and the sheer immensity of the place made it difficult to capture with the lens, especially from the level of the sea. At times like this you can just look, and wonder.
There is, of course, another problem with Ha Long Bay. There are too many people, but those too many people are us, all of us.
Still, we are glad that we came to this amazing natural wonder and glad that we had the luck of the one good day this week; again, there are thick clouds and a heavy mist. The few photos that we were lucky enough to get on the day we were gifted, will never do this place justice. We’ll post them soon.
We have set aside this day almost solely for organising our last few weeks in South East Asia. We’ve had a few rest days along the way - our days in Goa, for instance - and this is, kind of, a rest day too, but with a lot of work to do. When we left India and all its pre-planned travel, we’d thought how great it would be finally just to ‘see where we go next’, even if that was only only for eight weeks.
We strolled our way through Thailand and Laos, but we didn’t see much. Certainly not nearly enough. Then again, as early as India we’d concluded that you just can’t see everything and I only mean everything on your route, that tiny part of the country you visit. We’ve learned that when you stray even a little from your chosen path, there is a whole world that you are missing.
Now we have less than four weeks left in SE Asia. We have a rough idea of the places that we ‘must’ vist, but as we sit and try to break this next month into the parcels of days that we need for each of those places and organise how we get between each, we realise that our ‘must’ list breaks apart into a ‘really must’ list, without any of the ‘musts’ surrendering.
