November 2007 Archives

Tourists throng to Vietnam's Halong Bay for scenic beauty and delicious seafood.  But for locals, Halong is the center of an age-od culture that resolves entirely around the sea

By Karen Coates Photographs by Jason Lowe

Imagine the tempestous night, a gale ripping rooftops.  A thin, one-handed fisherman named Nguyen Thi Hung huddles in a weathered wooden boat-his-hom-as Tropical Storm Washi thrashes Halong Bay, in northern Vietnam.  The storms splits a fishing boat in half, it killls a shrimp farmer in his field.  Hung loses a few nights of work at sea.  He worries about his next catch.  He always worries as he toils beneath his boats's blazing lights, which beckon squid ot the murky surface: Will he catch enough?  It depends on luck.

Just south of China, Halong Bay is saturated with beauty-nearly 2,000 limestone isles jutting precipitously from the lapis-colored sea.  It's the place to visit in Vietnam today, but it is more than that; it's a place of historical eminence as well.  For it was here that some of Vietnam's first peoploe got their start, more than 25,000 years ago.  They lived in island caves and survived by the sea.  They fished. They ate.  And they set the tempo of a culture.  Even today, from its wet rice paddies with fattened fish to a coastline longer than CFalifornia's, Vietnam so depends on wate rthat the same word, nuoc, means both "water" and "country" in Vietnamese.  As everyone living on the bay understands, a Vietnam without water is a Vietnam without food.