Halong Bay-the sea of a thousand islands

Here is a shot from the window of my room while cruising out of Halong Bay (which means place of the ascending dragon).

I poked my head in to say hello to the captain and he immediately had me come in and have a try at it. 

Halong Bay is 600 square miles of ocean at the northern coast of Vietnam, containing thousands of island such as you seen here. They are all shapes and sizes but most are huge rocks that jut out of the ocean.  

So even though it looks like one long island, it's really lots of little ones that you're looking at now. 

You can't see too well but this is a list of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World and on it are: the Amazon, Table Mountain in South Africa, the PP Underground Rivers in the Phillipines, Komodo in Indonesia, Jeju Island (CHECK), Iguazu Falls (CHECK), and Halong Bay (CHECK). Three down, four to go!

This was inside Amazing Cave (that's the actual name of it). There are many caves in Halong Bay, and many of them were used by the Vietnamese during the war to store weapons and men. Now it's a place to walk around and as my guide said, "use  your imagination and guess what you can see"

Here's me at the exit of the caves, overlooking the water.

Wondering how people out at sea or on the various islands get their favorite drinks, snacks and  smokes? Talk about a convenience store.

I think the other one was a 7-11 and this one is a Wawa.

This is as close to the sunrise as I could get considering there are rocks in the way.

Since most of the islands are pretty hard to access and actually live on since they're just rocks, there are these floating villages

Sorry, hate to brag but take a look at my second night out in the bay-we stayed on a private beach in bungalows. There were about 20-30 guests and a few staff-otherwise it was all ours. 

This is a view from the private beach. The sand was beautiful and the water nearly bath temperature. On two different swims I reached two different rocks further out in the bay. Other than that, there wasn't much to do, and I'm not complaining about that.  

Just to brag some more: this is a view from my window. 

I was so surprised the next morning to discover that I could WALK the whole way to that large rock island, which the day before I'd swum to. The high to low tide was drastic and changed very suddenly. 

We stopped at a pearl farm of some sort to see how synthetic pearls are created. (They're not fake because they are still made by oyster, but the first step is helped along by these people in the shop.) Basically the oysters are artificially inseminated with a small bead and then after a few other cuts and snips here and there, they are deposited back into the ocean and left for up to 18 months. and abracadabra-you have a pearl.

I thought the advertising was priceless-on the left: "If don't buy, you will regret." on the right: "These pearls are unique in the world."