Hạ Long Bay

Where it sits. Hạ Long Bay occupies about 1,553 square kilometres of the Gulf of Tonkin off Quảng Ninh Province in northeastern Vietnam, some 165 kilometres east of Hanoi and immediately south of the city of Hạ Long, which faces the water across the Bãi Cháy bridge. Roughly 1,600 islands and islets rise out of it, most of them uninhabited limestone towers with sheer sides and jungle scalps. The UNESCO core zone covers 434 square kilometres and 775 of those islets; the site was inscribed in 1994 for its scenery, extended in 2000 to recognise its geology, and enlarged again in 2023 to take in the neighbouring Cát Bà archipelago, which is why the property now carries a double-barrelled name.

How the towers formed. This is drowned tower karst, the flooded twin of the limestone country inland at Ninh Bình. Carbonate rock several hundred metres thick accumulated over hundreds of millions of years, was uplifted and jointed, then weathered into cones and towers by tropical rainfall. Rising post-glacial seas invaded the resulting landscape roughly 8,000 years ago, leaving only the summits above water and cutting the deep notches visible at the base of nearly every island — a wave-cut waistline several metres up the rock. Inside the towers, older cave systems survive at various levels: Sửng Sốt on Bồ Hòn Island opens into two vast chambers, Thiên Cung and Đầu Gỗ are hung with stalactites floodlit in unfortunate colours, and a handful of islands enclose hangs, roofless lagoons reached through tidal tunnels.

The people of the bay. Fishing families lived on the water here for generations in rafted wooden houses at Cửa Vạn, Ba Hang, Vung Viêng and Cống Tàu, keeping grouper and cobia in netted pens beneath the floorboards. Most were resettled ashore at Hà Phong from 2014 on environmental and schooling grounds, and the remaining rafts are largely working or demonstration sites. The bay's other signature is the legend behind the name: Hạ Long means "descending dragon", and the story has a dragon and her offspring spitting jade and pearl into the sea to block an invasion fleet, the scattered gems becoming the islands. The Đỉnh Hương islet, a stone stack shaped like an incense burner, is printed on the 200,000-đồng banknote.

On screen. Hạ Long Bay is the setting of the last act of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), Pierce Brosnan's second Bond film, in which the media baron Elliot Carver hides his stealth ship among the karst islands in Vietnamese waters while Bond and Colonel Wai Lin, played by Michelle Yeoh, close in. The bay you visit is the place the film is about but not the place the film was shot. Eon's location work in Vietnam was blocked when permission was withdrawn shortly before production, and the unit relocated: Phang Nga Bay in Thailand doubled for Hạ Long, and Bangkok stood in for Ho Chi Minh City, including the rooftop motorcycle chase. Productions that did film in the bay itself include Régis Wargnier's Indochine (1992), which won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, and Kong: Skull Island (2017), which used Hạ Long alongside Ninh Bình and Quảng Bình.

What a visit actually involves. Almost everyone sees the bay from a licensed cruise boat, either as a day trip or on a one- or two-night itinerary sailing from Tuần Châu Marina or from Hòn Gai. A standard route takes in a cave, a kayaking stop in a sheltered lagoon, a climb of the 400-odd steps on Ti Tốp Island — named for the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who visited with Hồ Chí Minh in 1962 — and an overnight anchorage. Operators vary enormously in quality, and boat licences, routes and permitted anchorages are tightly controlled by the provincial authorities, so itineraries change. Lan Hạ Bay, on the Cát Bà side, carries a fraction of the traffic for near-identical scenery.

Prices separate cheerfully into three tiers — day boats from around a million đồng, mid-range overnight cabins, and a handful of genuinely expensive vessels with a dozen suites — and the difference usually shows in the route rather than the cabin, since the better licences reach quieter water.

Getting there and timing. The Hanoi–Hải Phòng–Hạ Long expressway, completed in 2018, put the bay about two and a half hours from the capital by road, and Vân Đồn airport opened the same year. October to April is the dry half of the year; October and November, plus March and April, deliver the clearest air. Winter brings a fine grey drizzle called mưa phùn that turns the islands into ink-wash silhouettes and can also cancel sailings. Typhoons close the bay outright for days at a time between June and September, and the port authority suspends departures without much warning.