We got up at 6 am to have breakfast and wait for a taxi which would take us to the Emperor Hotel in the Old City where we would get a coach to Halong Bay, 110 miles away. The taxi was late and when we got to the hotel the coach was late. An hour was wasted because the bus stopped at a service station on the Hanoi-Haiphong Expressway, ostensibly for a toilet break but (I suspect) there was also a huge shop full of tourist tat. After driving round Haiphong, we got to Halong Bay were we walked onto a cruise ship and joined dozens of other cruise ships to admire the truly spectacular scenery of thousands of tree-clad islands rising almost vertically out of the bay. We sat at a table with four young Australian girls (we were by far the oldest people on the ship) and had an extremely good meal including prawns caught in the bay. The boat stopped at Ti-Top Island which had a fine statue of a European-looking man in a military uniform. He is German Titov, the second man in space after Yuri Gagarin, and the island was named after him in 1962. We were supposed to be at the wharf at 2 pm to rejoin the boat, but as we waited it started raining with vivid flashes of lightening and loud thunderclaps. There was a particularly severe gust of wind at 1.30, and the boat didn’t return until 2.45. On the coach back to Hanoi our guide, Ms Phung, told us that a boat had overturned and we subsequently learned that 38 people had died. A sobering thought: it could have been us.
Paddy fields on the road to Haiphong
The Red River
Landscape round Haiphong
Suburb of Haiphong
Our dinner on the boat
Boat driver
Ti-Top Island
Gherman Titov
