Tam Coc

We were supposed to go Halong Bay on the 4th day, but the trip was canceled due to thunderstorm and hence we took a detour to Tam Coc, the so called "Halong Bay on Land". The journey from Hanoi to Ninh Binh took around 2 hours by mini van and we stopped by some temples dedicated to King Dinh and King Le. Our tour guide gave us some history briefing which went along the line of this king loved his second son more and so passed the throne to him. The first son became jealous and killed the second son. After a while the first son was killed by someone else. Sounds so familiar eh?

Lotus stem for sale.

They offer up both fake and real money.
The arc is so low, they're really petite huh?

Fooling around with moo-moo cow. Or was it a buffalo?
As usual, this photography session was not FOC. The owner asked for 10000 VND ( 15000 VND = 1 USD ) but will do with 5000 VND since I didn't have any small change.

The busy wharf.

Our rowers.

The young, the old and the locals.

The beautiful journey, which took us ~ 2 hours to and fro.

The inhabitants there.

The creative rower, the "water vendors".

We were cornered by the water vendors pressing us to buy something from them. We declined politely many times over the overpriced tidbits, but the rowers did not want to let us go. The water vendors gestured to us that we should treat the rowers some drinks; which we thought we probably should and got the soft drink (USD1/can) for the rower.

The gloomy weather.

The pouring rain.

Our rowers hold us to ransom under this cave. She tried to sell us some merchandise. We declined and so they (the rowers) refused to budge. It was getting dark and we were positive that we were the last boat in our group to get on shore, thanks to the heavy merchandise that the lady rower carried with her in the boat. I guess it was illegal because they had to detour to pick up and drop the merchandise, not wanting to bring it near the shore. No choice, so MH bought a t-shirt from her with the price of 2x or 3x of the street price. She was not done yet, kept pestering me to buy something from her too! And so another 2x or 3x overpriced t-shirt for me before they started rowing again.

The choppy journey had not ended yet. As we got near the wharf, that lady rower started to poke and tap MH's shoulder asking for tips. Under the heaving pouring, MH tried to gesture her that she should send us back first but no she wanted it there and then. That caught us unprepared because neither our tour agent nor our Tam Coc tour guide told us about tipping the rowers, and we didn't see any signboard telling us that, if it's a must. Our Halong Bay tour which we swapped this tour with, cost us USD55** per person and we had paid upfront. We wafted a while under the rain before she finally sent us on shore. And what did we do? We ran for our life of course! :) We did felt a tad bad about not tipping but we were really pissed of with their attitude. After ripping us of from the soft drink and the t-shirt, should we had tipped them?

** MH gave our tour agent contact to his friend and the very same fellow quote her USD150 per person for the same trip! She was smart to enough to ask around other tour agent and got it for USD65. She went last week.

The good photographer and the blogger.

The end.