KayakHalongBay.com

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.

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