We took a 1-day side trip to Ha Long Bay, east of Hanoi on the coast just above Haiphong.  This is a bay famous for its beauty, its “Karst” islands, caverns and diving.

Usually, this is a two or three day tour, but we all felt at the end that unless you wanted to do the diving or visit the nature-preserve island, that one day was sufficient, if a bit long with about 8 hours of driving and 4 on the bay.

This was the most crowded tourist destination of our trip.  This is a “Disneyland” setup of myriad tour boats at a huge port facility all making one of a few set tours depending on the duration.  They do an excellent job of moving the vast number of tourists.

The picture is a few minutes out of the embarcadero facilities  as the first group of islands is approached.  Look at the number of boats in view for this brief moment.

Each tourist boat is “boarded” by a few smaller boats trying to sell fruits or other items to the tourists.  The boat-handling and polite rules are astounding.