So. The good stuff first? Halong bay was beautiful, and my trip there was a lot of fun. I went on a three day tour (a three day tour) with a nice Australian family of four. And that was it. On a big boat. Only us.

Jake, their son, loves LotR, so we talked about that pretty extensively while Brooke, their daughter, showed me her plans for the Devil's Village. Apparently, not only does the Devil need souls, but he's exceedingly lazy (makes sense), so feeds his subjects metal, and then calls them to him via powerful magnets. Their father is a lawyer, and their mother a teacher or something. Dunno, really, didn't talk to them as much.

When I was a kid, I only wanted to hang out with old people and have tea. Now I only want to hang out with kids and build forts for the Devil. Go figure.

Our tour continued with a night spent onthe boat, and the next day arrival at a beach camp on one of the thousands of islands in the bay. Just us and our guide. We took out kayaks and paddled about the bay, checking out some caves and the local fish farmers. The farmers live in floating villages throughout the bay, and grow huge fish in farms under their houses. It seems a strange existance, every day spent on the water, remote and ironically, in this vast landscape of towering rock and endless ocean, confined.

And the landscape is endless, without scale. Huge karst towers sit like floating cities on the water, the rock undercut by a millenia of tides. Jungles grow on the leviathans' backs, fish rise about their flanks, and birds of different song wheel about them, high overhead. In some are huge caves, breathing deeply with the waves. Some make bridges and gates to hidden lagoons.

At night the place is otherworldy. Prehistoric.

Some of the sights there I think I'll keep to myself for a while, so I can think about them some more and let them stay liquid, unconfined by language.

The next day we took the boat and bus back to Hanoi, and here's where I get to complain again. I arrived dead broke and sick, but with a room already paid for and waiting. Or so I thought. Trying to check in, I got the, "Please come back in ten minutes while my staff gets the room ready." Ten becomes twenty, and twenty became an hour, then two. And what could I do? I had no cash, just this non-existant room. I gripe, they give me a suite, but only for three hours or so. Why? "Oh, some people from America have booked it." "What about my reservation? Why can't you honor it?" Finally, after much griping on my part I get a broom closet or something. By now I was sick for real, and just fell on the bed, all fight out of me. In the morning, I collected my laundry, which I gave them three days ago and which they ruined, and moved.

I now own just one pair of pants, which I have been wearing for far, far too long.

I start for home in fourty-two hours, ten minutes.