Halong Bay...

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Halong Bay

Amazing to watch the islands drift passed, cloaked in green. It makes you wonder what they are made from, that they survived the rigours that ate their kin. Others have bites and caves as if the sea is anxious for their return. The story goes that a giant dragon crashed through the land, the sea sweeping through the area where his body landed, his bones lie in the sand.
It is eerie as the mists come down watching the giant looming shadows emerge beside you, and it must be eerier still on the small boats that put-put around the bay, selling water and Oreos to the tourists.
And we are floating, rowing in tandem in the greeny blue of the South China Sea. It is strangely peaceful even though there are fourteen kayaks in the water. The stillness reaches us and awe, sheer breathtaking wonder sinks in. Look at us. Paddling through the sea, in one of the most spectacular places in the world. And we slip in, through a cave, it is so big as it slips overhead, with cracks and fissures. This is an unsettling notion, this earth, this solid hunk of rock is as permeable as life. Isolated and strong, surrounded by beauty, slowly being sullied, being tainted by a hand not its own. And you can tell that soon, in the life span of rock, it will moan and topple, and join the bones of the dragon at the bottom of the sea, it will join bones, and the tourists’ rubbish, settling finally, to be eroded to nothing, remembered only by a handful of travellers who slunk beneath its shady shadow into the sheltered cave beyond and then, falcons. Wheeling and playing and calling to each other, and we just stopped. Twenty-eight beating hearts stilled. Its different here. Life is grittier. Closer to the edge. You can trek through dense forests without a cursory health check, climb a mountain, dive naked from the top deck of a junk after fifteen beers at two o’clock in the morning with natural debris, and human waste floating beside you. Life is grittier, life is cheaper. But there are moments when the twin circling of playful falcons can take your breath away.

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Photos

Halong Bay
Reflective water on Halong