Halong Bay

Hanoi, Saturday, January 11--Yesterday was five hours on the bus, but it was worth it to see the magnificent rock formations in Halong Bay from the deck of tourist boat traveling around them.  They are really quite incredible, though we were told that they are not at their best.

The recent typhoon that trees and split along the roadsides from Hanoi to Haiphong to Halong also damaged the formations.  Most of the bushes and trees that sided them and provided interesting color and variation were blown off, along with moss and lichen as far as we could make out.  This means the formations lack a depth of character that we had expected.  Nonetheless they were worth seeing.  Ben found the caves particularly interesting, some of them raised from the bottom of the sea millions of years ago.

The food on the boat was typically Vietnamese.  The style of presentation is Chinese, with family style dishes that are split among diners.  However the food is interesting in presentation but it is not, in any way, highly spiced.  The dipping sauces also tend to be bland to us whose main knowledge of East and Southeast Asian food is Mandarin and Thai.  Good tasting but not enormously interesting.

Last night we stayed in at the hotel and had pho for dinner.  Very nicely done.  A big bowl of noodles, broth and beef bits for John and chicken bits for Ben.  We found out from a server at breakfast that pho is pronounced, not Po, but pfoe, with a only a slight mention of the p sound.

We are off to our last breakfast at the Westlake Intercontinental, a superb hotel, with a magnificent breakfast buffet of Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Indian tables, and, of course, a Western breakfast chef, which looked so ordinary.  Dragonfruit, by the way, is superb.  We must find it in DC.