Traditionally, Ha Long Bay supported only local fishermen. Generations of fishermen have lived on floating platforms where they raised fish, squid and shellfish in nets and cages below. Recently Ha Long Bay has shifted its focus away from fishing and toward tourism. It is a place of wonder and a place to be explored. The bay is also a place to get to know the Vietnamese concept of tourism.
Hundreds of wooden boats, crosses between Chinese Junks and Vietnamese Dragon Boats are packed into the harbor for tours. A gate bars tourists without tickets from pier and the boats. Captains and tour guides haggle over prices and destinations as they both try to combine groups for the tour. Once the guide secures a boat everyone is allowed through the gate into another throng of people. The pier is actually a concrete staircase that just into the bay about 100 yards. On each side of the staircase boat are wedged in. The bay is dirty. Trash floats by as the boats bump into each other. 
Garbage blows off of the boats. Rarely could I look over the waves and not see a plastic bag or bottle floating. The government has also built a small island where once there were only fishing platforms. The fishermen have been removed from some areas of the bay and forced to abandon fishing or work elsewhere. The island they have built will be a tourist destination with hotels and recreation facilities. Fortunately, the island was built just outside of what is considered the park that surrounds the islands.
Diep, after negotiating for ten or fifteen minutes finally told us that we would have a boat to ourselves. We followed him to our boat walked down the steps and onto the rough wooden deck. Boats, all with the same lines, looking identical except for their sizes ringed the pier. More boats buoyed just off the pier waited for access. Boats left with tourists and boats squeezed into the pier to unload the tourists that had finished their morning or week long tours. There was scarcely room to maneuver our boat away from the pier. As our captain put our boat into reverse, sailors from other boats pushed their boats away from ours trying to create room for us to exit. A boat coming into the dock didn’t pass by before we emerged into the narrow channel full of traffic. Our thick stern smacked their thick wooden stern. The boats are already marred by all of the jostling in the bay and no new visible damage was done to either boat.
Beyond the litter in the water and the hustle of the shore, the bay is beautiful. Many of the landscape and even seascape portraits from the Far East depict steep sided mountains. At times there will be people working in the rice paddies below with their water buffalo pulling a plow.
In the seascapes wooden junks pass each other with orange sails raised. Rarely can these paintings be identified to a specific location. In Buddhist tradition the artist doesn’t paint a specific landscape, seascape or even a portrait of a person. The artist paints according to long established traditions. The art is balanced according to Buddhist ideas and there are defined rules for painting landscapes, the sea or people. Even so, the steep sided islands jutting out of the sea reminded me of many of the landscape and seascape paintings that I have seen.Just outside of the tourist harbor, maybe 5 kilometers away is the nearest island.
It is horseshoe shaped. The small harbor within has a dock for disembarkation and another for embarkation. These docks are separated by thick growths of trees on the islands steeply slanted coast. There is only one small building visible from the bay. It is a tourist stand built on one of the docks. This island houses two magnificent caves. We walked up the side of the hill to the first cave.
Fishermen discovered this cave in 1995. The cave is so large that from the inside it is easy to imagine that the mountain on the outside is just a thin eggshell. A few hundred meters further east is another cave equally as large.The second cave was discovered centuries ago. In fact it was used 800 years ago by the Emperor of Vietnam to store weapons, mostly stakes and spears, to use against the invading Mongols. These stake were used in the Red River to prevent the Mongol boats from progressing up the river to attack Hanoi. The Mongols were repulsed, and began a list of the many armies to try to invade Viet Nam with out success.
Once we returned to our boat we traveled around to the south side of the island. This side of the island faces away from the city and the tourist areas along the coast. Between the islands is another harbor. This harbor still houses a floating village of fishing families. A school floats in the middle of the houses. The school was recently built.
Ha Long Bay Beforehand the children living in this part of the bay didn’t have access to education. Boats dock at the fishing platforms to get a firsthand look at the fish that are trapped below the platforms and provide a living for the families. The Vietnamese are trying to balance the growing tourist market with the traditional low income fishing villages. So far it looks like the fishing families have been pushed aside, except for the few families that have become a part of the tourist industry and now welcome tourists on their floating houses.
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