"When you're on a golden sea, you don't need no memory, just a place to call your own, as we drift into the zone."-- "Island in the Sun", Weezer

Halong Bay… yet another UNESCO World Heritage site.

Legend has it that Viet Nam was going to be attacked, so a dragon jumped out of Hanoi and landed in Halong Bay shooting up the limestone rocks everywhere to protect the country. Which it actually did a pretty good job at doing.

At first gimpse you don’t realize how much is around you… it looks a lot like a lagoon from the Marshalls… except with height… then suddenly you are surrounded by thousands upon thousands of little islands.

If you look behind me you can see that there is a floating village in these islands… there was even a dog… and people rowing up to your boat… or to you while you were swimming asking you if you want to buy anything…

Here you can see the storm rolling in ... we actually had incredible weather considering how rainy it had been all trip... this really just rolled in, and rolled away again... the rain really didn't get us until the night

And here is a ship putting up its traditional sails

We stopped off at a grotto/caves… yes it involved more steps… but was pretty awesome inside

Here is the view from outside the caves looking down on part of the bay…

Then there’s me chillaxin in the sun… gotta love feet pictures

Then there were those who went kayaking ( we all know how I feel about kayaking)... particularly funny was the fact that a few people got kayaks... then the boat left that area... and turned into a whole new area... leaving them behind... now all the boats out here look exactly the same... so we were pretty sure we lost them... but they found us in the end...

But we all went swimming… The boys even jumped off the roof of the boat… I had briefly considere jumping... at first i didn't think Thinh was serious that were were allowed... so I just jumped off the edge of the boat... Actually I was the first to jump and it was still a little high... but then the boys did their thing... The crazy thing was the water had so much salt in it that I didn’t have to tread water… I just basically sat there, not moving… it was pretty crazy awesome… except for the jellyfish of course… evil bastards.

And here’s Thinh learning to swim… then we caught the sunset a bit…

Here is the sunset.... not spectacular... but nice.

And came close to some rocks…

But this here is my favorite picture… everything silhouetted by the sunset… you can even see the pagoda at the top of the far right mountain.

Then at night you could see and hear the other ships all around us…

Here’s Helena, Kat, Tony, and Andy… plus me, Rachel, and Quinton… we stayed up playing card games, drinking, and turning my i-pod on as loud as my headphones would go so we had some music. It was exactly what a vacation should be.