I’m still trying to come to terms with how I feel about this part of our trip. Ultimately, our 2-day visit to Ha Long Bay was full of contrasts: it was both breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly ugly. The limestone islands that spring out of the bay were truly magnificent, but the whole experience left me feeling like nothing more than a consumer–and an irresponsible one at that.
Part of the problem was that to view the bay, you pretty much have to join an organized tour, so you are herded from place to place by people who go through the same routine every day. The other part of the problem is that 40% of all foreign tourists in Vietnam go to Ha Long Bay. That’s about a million and a half people a year. And we’re all killing the place. As Bill Hayton writes in Vietnam: Rising Dragon, “Ha Long’s beauty endures but beneath the surface it’s dying.” Mangrove forests have been stripped from the coast. That, along with the effects of coal mining in the area, has filled rivers, streams, and the bay with coal dust, killing the corals and sea life that once flourished there. What’s more, the boats on Ha Long Bay are supposed to unload their passengers’ “toilet waste” when they return to shore, but only the most expensive cruse ships have the necessary technology to do so. So, insteady, they empty it into the bay. And, as Hayton puts it, we were all sailing around on “the shit of a million and half boat passengers a year.”
As you’ll see in the pictures below, the views were amazing and it was truly an exceptional experience to sit on top of our boat and look out over the misty sea as the sun went down. But if I could change one part of our trip to Vietnam, I would choose to not contribute to the destruction of this magical place.
