Tam Coc: Hey, More Karsts!

From Hanoi I grabbed a minivan down to Ninh Binh, a little town a few hours south of Hanoi with a lot of guesthouses and no restaurants. (The people are lovely, though- people said hello and practiced their English at me, I got a wordless high-five from a gardener, and an old man thrust his one-year-old granddaughter into my arms when I applauded her toddling.) It's not really set up for tourists, but it should be, because it's the closest town to Tam Coc, which is very, very worth seeing.

Tam Coc means "three caves", and is a site full of rice fields and karst towers along the Ngo Dong River. There have been a lot of karsts on this blog, but I liked these the best. When you're touring them you pass right under and through them, and even though I did the very same thing in Halong Bay in a kayak, they seem so much more striking when they're jutting out of the green high grasses of the rice fields. 

The only way to see Tam Coc is by renting a boat, rowed by local women who do so with their feet. 

They row you through a path carved through the rice. 

I don't know what to say about this place, except that it seems otherworldly and mystical. The karsts of Halong Bay or Southern Thailand rose from the water, which, although dramatic, isn't unfamiliar. My brain, I think, interpreted them along the same lines as sudden-rising islands or maybe icebergs. But here you have two seemingly incongruous landscapes occupying the same space.

Pagoda on top of a karst. How did they get that up there? 

When we went into this cave I kept waiting for the ride to kick in.

It reminded me of the Pirates of the Caribbean roller coaster at Disney World. But the speed stayed constant and nothing jumped out at me.

More superb photography. 

It was dark and spooky and all kinds of awesome. 

And then back out into the overcast day and the fortress of the karsts to see blue-grey cranes dancing in the rice and a lost white goat picking his way along a sheer rock face, a hundred feet up. 

After we finished paddling around and the locals tried to sell me everything from Oreos to handicrafts, I climbed back onto my rented motorbike and went to find Bich Dong, a pagoda built into Ngu Nhac Mountain dating back to 1428. 

There are three structures layered up the mountain, so I climbed up to the first...

And then to the second...

And through a cave with shrines inside...

 to exit here...

And find this view. 

But then I scrambled up a little farther to the highest structure:

and higher on a rocky trail just to do it and to look out on this:  

...which was pretty sweet. 

I scrambled down and made my way out, and climbed back on my motorbike to tool around the countryside for a bit, where houses were backed up right against the rock.

The road exiting Tam Coc had long rice fields and houses with the karsts hunched behind it all on one side.

And on the other, some kind of industrial something, which added a sort of dystopian effect.  

And a beautiful young girl was washing clothing in a drainage ditch. 

Jeez, I have real problems with achieving level horizons. 

When I got back to the highway that runs between Ninh Binh and Tam Coc, I almost immediately hit some very intense traffic of both vehicles and pedestrians. 

When I reached the bottleneck I found that there hadn't been an accident; the traffic was caused people crowding in the road, in the median, and on the train tracks next to the road to get a glimpse of a Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage, who was getting to wherever he was going using full prostrations. 

This is another photo of traffic. I couldn't get close enough to see the monk, who was a rockstar. 

That means he was doing this:

Over and over and over again. But each time he got back up he brought his feet to where his hands had been, and made his way forward that way, rather than taking any actual steps. Some pilgrims doing full prostrations end up with thick callouses on their noses and foreheads (and, one would imagine, knees and hands) from touching them to the ground countless times along their way.  It's extremely hard core. 

He was preceded by women from the town sweeping the pavement ahead of him, a nun overseeing that, and two nuns following him, singing. When I lingered at the head of that procession to try unsuccessfully for a decent photo, the nun at the head of the line grabbed me and asked (through a bystander) where I was from. I said the U.S. (I was the only Westerner in the crowd), and she rummaged about in her bag and handed me a data CD with Vietnamese on it. I thanked her for it, and she patted me on the shoulder. Then I sped off, because the police were starting to get pushy.

I'm still carrying that CD, because I'm not carrying any technology to see what's on it. I'm sure it's in Vietnamese and that I won't understand a bit of it, but how could I throw something like that away?

Halong Bay

Everyone in Hanoi insists that you must, must go to Halong Bay. To come to Vietnam and not see the sun rising over the majestic, jewel-like karsts and sparkling off the bay's sapphire water from the deck of your orange-sailed junk is a crime, a crime! 

Yeah, that photo isn't mine. I didn't see sunrise. Or sunset. Vietnam is disgustingly expensive by Southeast Asian standards, so I couldn't afford that nonsense. I also saw some pretty good karst action in Southern Thailand and felt that Halong Bay couldn't be that much better. So I took a day trip and spent just a few hours there. And even though it was extremely overcast and the cheap tour hurried us through our activities in order to get back to Hanoi before midnight, it was still worth doing.  

I and several other tourists, including a Chinese woman named Yuan who became my Halong Bay buddy, climbed aboard a ferry and headed out into the bay. Even darkened by clouds, the place was pretty beautiful. 

Slightly skewed photo courtesy of being on a boat. 

But it wasn't Halong Bay's best day. Here's another one from the internet showing the place in sunny weather. 

You can see why the local legend tells that the islets were once jewels and jade, designedly dropped by dragons to assist the Vietnamese in defending their country from the evil invading Chinese with a wall of staggered stone.

Our first stop was at a cave discovered by a fisherman a few years ago during a thunderstorm. Caves are apparently a big tourist draw in Halong, so whoever is in charge of these things has recently opened a few more to the public. 

It must have been quite something when the fisherman stumbled on it. Unfortunately, that same body who is in charge of these things decided to light the cave with multi-colored lights, which made it look like it was a few strobe lights away from opening as a nightclub.

Our adorable, pint-size guide Chau led us around the cave, pointing out unicorns, dragons, and turtles in the rock formations. Sometimes they looked more or less like the things they were supposed to be, like this turtle, for whom people left offerings:

What is a stone turtle going to do with money? Also, ignore the camera strap. I was really on a roll in the photography department that day. 

Less so with this one, which is supposed to be a dragon. Whoever does these things even added little red eyes in the rock. 

See it? Me neither. 

She pointed out all manner of things in the rock formations and the shadows they cast. I particularly liked this exchange she and I had:

Chau: Do you know the novel Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare?

Me: Play. 

Chau: What?

Me: Nothing. Yes. 

Chau: Well, in this cave we have our own Romeo and Juliet. Do you see Romeo there? (points at a shadow 
vaguely resembling a man.) And can you see Juliet? 

Me: (mostly to myself) Well, I'm going to guess that it's the balcony scene. So she must be somewhere up...

Chau: Yes! There she is! (Points at a vaguely woman-shaped shadow.) Now in the novel, one of them dies. 

Me: Actually...

Chau: But in this cave, they do not die. They have children! Do you see the children? (points at lumps of rock.) It is better that way. 

Me: ....I...okay. 

After that brief appreciation of fine literature, we got back on the boat and headed further into the bay. Yuan and I sat at the blunt bow and dangled our feet over the water, breathing in the breeze and watching the faces of the islands change shape as we passed them and discovered their irregular facets. This was my favorite part of the trip, and I wish I could have spent all day doing it. 

But it was only about 25 minutes before we reached the fishing village which I suspect now makes a living more on tourism than fishing. 

Upon our arrival we were immediately set upon by floating fruit vendors. I bought a dollar's worth of rambutan, and was given about six of them (you'd get twenty or so in Hanoi). 

Then Yuan and I climbed into kayaks and set out for a 30 minute paddle. She had never kayaked before, but was a quick study under my expert tutelage. She also surprised me with her wicked sense of humor, and we giggled while making up stories about the rock faces that involved dragons and princesses and the evil Chinese attacking the hapless Vietnamese (wildly disrespectful, I know). 

But mostly we were pretty quiet as we glided through low caves and into empty, sheltered inlets. 

And then, all too soon, we climbed out of our battered kayaks and onto our boat to cruise back to Halong City. 

And from there to bus back to Hanoi and the monsoon that was dumping buckets of water on the city.