From my room on the ship this morning. The porthole is inoperable so on the nightstand one of the items is a rubber sledgehammer. However in my bathroom there was a perfectly operable window. Not sure why the hammer would ever be needed.
Halong Bay is one of those unique parts of our planet unbelievable as we are there. Limestone forms called karsts push up vertically from the sea. Once entirely under the sea the small mountains now cover a large area outside the growing city of Halong. South Koreans are usually crowding the area, with Chinese a close second but the Coronavirus has stopped a lot of traveling in the region. For us it was magical. Very few other people in the cavern we visited. It seemed to me that there were a lot of boats, but only a percentage of normal times.
We went out on a tender to out boat which was a converted fishing boat. We had all 12 rooms each with a bathroom. When cane aboard we dropped our luggage d had a fine lunch in the dining room. It looks small and it is a bit smaller than some others. But not the smallest boat. A fancier vessel but we have such a great group and that would be hard to match.
After lunch we went on a tender to a cavern where we did 600 stairs and a mess of steps in and around a massive cave.
The massive space has walkways in one direction. At one point I thought maybe I would go back down. But our tender had already move the end of the one way route. So I kept going.
We got back to the boat through spectacular scenes of boats and karsts.
The red sails were put up while we were in the cave.
As evening fell the colors began to shift and things became even more ephemeral.
Lights began to come on on the boats as the sun fell lowered.
daily woodring 
fantastic photos
thanks for sending
what a marvelous trip
warm hugs
dee
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