HomeIf Halong Bay is heaven, Halong City can be hell. Overdeveloped but underloved, the hideous high-rise hotels come in every shade of pastel and the beaches are definitely not the best in the region. However, the majority of food, accommodation and other life-support systems for Halong Bay are found in Halong City. The capital of Quang Ninh province, it is sin city, with “massage” heavily promoted at every hotel. The town draws large numbers of domestic tourists and, until recently, was a major magnet for Chinese tourists. Suddenly they stopped coming, giving birth to a million conspiracy theories about bankrupting hotels to buy them out.
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If you have any choice in the matter, stay on a boat in the bay rather than in a hotel in Halong City. The majority of visitors who do I stay here opt for Bai Chay. There are hundreds of hotels located here, and keen competition keeps prices down, especially if you can avoid the commission-seeking touts. Prices rise in the peak season (summer) or during the Tet festival. There are also accommodation options in Hon Gai, but it’s noisier and dustier across the water.. .coal dust that is!
The nearby island of Dao Tuan Chau has been overhauled as a luxury resort retreat, an attempted antidote to the mistakes made in the development of Halong City.
Minihotels aside, most hotels have restaurants. If you’re in Halong City as part of a tour, the meals are usually included.
Unsurprisingly, seafood is a serious feature of most menus. There are a couple of seafood strips in the centre of town, south of the post office along Halong Str. The strip nearest the post office is on the slide and several places have been converted to souvenir shops in the last couple of years. However, the second strip, a few hundred meters south, is still going strong. Aim for the places with fresh seafood in tanks out the front, or gravitate to where the locals a dining. All have tables inside and spill out onto the pavement at night. These are good places to indulge in a beer in the absence any real bars in town.
Asia Restaurant
Tel: 846 927 – Add: Vuon Dao Str – Main: 20,000 – 40,000d
One of the few restaurants daring to intrude on “hotel alley”, this is a reliable spot for Vietnamese food and a smattering Western favorites. The owner used to run the restaurant in East Berlin and speaks excellent German and pretty good English.
Getting There & Away
BOAT
With a marked improvement in road around the region, boat transport is not as popular as it once was, but the hydrofoil Mong Cai remains a good option for any overlanding to China.
There are daily slow boats connecting Hon Gai with Haiphong (35,000d, three hours). Boats depart Hon Gai at 6.30am, 11am and 4pm. It could be considered a cheap way to do a Halong Bay tour. There are no longer hydrofoils linking Halong and Haiphong, as travel by road is cheaper and just as fast.
Rugged, craggy and jungle-clad Cat Ba, the largest island in Halong Bay, is straight out of Jurassic Park. Lan Ha Bay, off the eastern side of the island, is especially scenic and offer numerous beaches to explore. While the vast majority of Halong Bay’s islands are uninhabited vertical rocks. Cat Ba has a few fishing villages, as well as a fast-growing town.
Except for a few fertile pockets, the fertile pocket is too rocky for serious agriculture; most residents earn their living from the sea, while others cater to the tourist trade. Life has always been hard here and many Cat Ba resident joined the exodus of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s and 80s. Although the island lost much of its fishing fleet this way, overseas Vietnamese have sent back large amounts of money to relatives on the island, fuelling the hotel boom of the past decade. Cat Ba is still relatively laid-back, despite about a 20-fold increase in hotel rooms (and karaoke machines!) since 1996.
There’s more to northeastern Vietnam than Halong Bay. The sinking limestone plateau which gave birth to the bay’s spectacular islands, continues for some 100 km to the Chinese border. The area immediately north of Halong Bay is part of Bai Tu Long National Park (Tel: 793 365).
Bai Tu Long Bay is every bit as beautiful as its famous neighbor. Indeed, in some ways beautiful, since it has scarcely seen any tourist development. This is good news and bad news. The bay is unpolluted and undeveloped, but there’s little tourism infrastructure. It’s pretty hard traveling around and staying here, and unless you speak Vietnamese, it’s difficult to get information.
Charter boats can be arranged to Bai Tu Long Bay from Halong Bay; boats range from 100,000d to 250,000d per hour depending size and amenities.The one-way trip take about five hours. A cheaper alternative is travel overland to Cai Rong and visit the out-lying islands by boat from here. Foreigners are almost always charged double the going rate on the ferries around Bai Tu Long Bay.
The first thing you need to know about Ha Long Bay is that it’s beautiful and well-worth seeing.
The only real question for the traveler in Vietnam is how best to see it and, like many things in Vietnam, things are never as clear a they could be
Travel agents who promise the earth, but fail to deliver combined with travelers whose expectations are totally unrealistic makes for a volatile Ha Long Bay cocktail.
The overwhelming majority of travelers experience a Ha Long Bay cruise via a group tour that begins and ends in Hanoi, where there’s a dizzying variety of tours, with prices ranging from about US$12 a day to $70 and up per person.
Ha Long Bay is cluttered with some 500 licensed junks, and on any given day, up to 300 of them may be plying the waters — that’s basically one boat for every ten ticket offices in Hanoi!
Competition has driven prices down to absurdly low levels and as corner cutting, cheating and bare-faced lies become par for the course so do travelers leaving with a bad taste in their mouth… but it needn’t be that way.
Doing your research and asking the right questions — not just of the travel agent you’re dealing with, but also other travelers you meet along the way — can go a long way to making sure your junk ain’t sunk.
So, how do you know which Ha Long Bay tour is the one for you? We’ll get to that, but first, here’s some background on the site.
Ha Long Bay for backpackers
Two night/three day budget tour
Crammed into a jam-packed minivan, our tour commenced with us circling the block a few times to avoid getting ticked by the cops for illegally stopping to pick up some of our passengers, but then we were away and our guide introduced himself. In his quite decent English, he explained that the 160km journey to Ha Long City would take three hours — apparently the slow going was due to the police — not to worry, if there were no cops around, we were assured, our driver would attempt to speed whenever possible.
The trip included a 15-minute stop at a crafts centre set up for victims of Agent Orange and at 11:00 we reached Ha Long City. Once there our guide promptly got into a 15-minute argument with another guide, and we were eventually put into another minivan and driven to the pier at Bai Chay.
Ha Long Bay for flashpackers
Two night/three day mid-range tour
As with the budget tour, we kicked off with a packed minivan, but unlike the previous tour the staff were better trained, spoke better English, and were more informative. Again we stopped off at the crafts centre for the victims of Agent Orange, but were spared the confusion of any more stops and delivered straight to the pier.
Once there we still had to climb over several boats to get to ours, but when we did, we found a beautiful, new wooden junk. There was no top deck, but there were decks fore and aft with sun-loungers that actually had cushions! And tables to sit around, and a big pagoda thingy on the bow to shield us from the sun. More importantly, the boat set sail with a compliment of eight passengers, without packing it full of day-trippers.
Ha Long Bay for budget-busters
One night/two day upper-range tour
Many of the luxury tours offer two nights on the boat, and skip the whole Cat Ba Island experience, so we booked a two-day, one-night tour just to give us a taste of luxury.
The difference was apparent from the outset. Passengers were driven from Hanoi to Ha Long City in a large, comfortable tour bus, even though there was only a compliment of eight. As with all other tours we again swung through the crafts centre for the victims of Agent Orange.
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