Vietnam Photos: Halong Bay

I finally got around to sorting through all 28,600 of the photos one of my camera-happy friends uploaded to Snapfish of our trip to Vietnam. Here are a few of Halong Bay, which is a three-hour drive from Hanoi and supposedly a UNESCO World Heritage site. Sadly, the bay is inundated by tour boats (just like the one we stayed on overnight *wince*), nobody seems to be doing much in terms of preservation, and there was a lot of garbage floating in the bay's trademark milky green waters.

As idyllic as this picture appears, I'm fairly certain this woman brings her children out to pose in front of the tour boats on a regular basis, since the minute my friend took this shot, the woman was paddling over to ask for money.

Polluted as it was, Halong Bay--whose name, by the way, in Vietnamese sounds nothing like any way you might attempt to pronounce it--is however quite a photogenic thing, and thus I am sharing these few shots (all of which were taken by my friend, who I'd give credit to, except that I don't know if she'd really want her name posted and, thus, connected with this blog. Of course I could just ask, but I'm too lazy. This is why for the most part I've refrained from using other peoples' pictures on my blog, even when I see something extremely post-worthy. I just don't feel confident of the whole Fair Use doctrine, though my blog is undoubtedly for my own personal, non-for-profit use. I can still see someone having a major hissy fit, and I do believe in asking permission before using someone's work. But in this case, since it's a friend and all that. This parenthesized aside has gotten completely out of hand, so I'll stop now.).

One of the nice tour boats clogging up the bay.