Tourist Guilt: Give Ha Long Bay some alone time

In 2012, Vietnam's Ha Long Bay became one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature. A UNESCO world heritage site and a prime tourist destination, the bay boasts over 1600 tiny islands and limestone pillars within a 40,000+ hectare region of calm seawaters. A trip to Vietnam will undoubtedly lead you to its pristine shores.

In 2011, I travelled to Ha Long Bay myself--I wish I hadn't. Yes, I fell into the usual tourist traps: 'cheap' accommodation and tours that left us in the middle of nowhere and required us to pay further fees for the 'tour guide' to transport us back to civilisation. I was angry, to put it mildly.

But putting to one side my naïve interpretation of the garbage that these hawkers fed us, what angered me most was the garbage that they fed into the sea. A walk along the beach prior to the tour's departure, I sighted children swimming in the sea amongst ice cream packets and plastic bags. Some teenagers laughed together on the pier, discarding chip packets into the sea without a second's thought. In the horizon, the misty fog trapped in the pollution, forming a haze over the horizon that sat well below my comfort level.

A tour over Ha Long bay took us out into the misty fog to spend a night on the troubled waters. And troubled waters they were. Those icecream packets that had washed up to shore earlier were simply the tip of a garbage-pile iceberg floating in the ocean. Looking out into the sea from our boat's vantage point, in no direction was there a clear, garbage-free line of site. Countless plastic bags, beer bottles, and even an entire rotten furniture set floated by. Fish floated on the surface of the oily water, dead and decomposing in the toxic water.

Let's blame the tourists, and there were many of them. Many were annoying, loud, and uncaring. For example, some particularly irritating teenagers on our tour boat made drunken mockery of the women who swam in the toxic waters attempting to sell us bottles of water. I felt embarrassed to be on their boat, and shamed of my presence on a bay that clearly needed some alone time.

But it's not that simple. No doubt pressured by a reliance on tourist dollars, the infrastructure to deal with such high tourist volumes was just nowhere to be found. Many other tourists, like me, were disgusted to witness tour guides themselves collecting their boat's rubbish and emptying it into the sea. But how can I judge a country where so many people live in poverty, for not having the same environmental priorities as we do?

Perhaps Vietnam hopes that Ha Long bay's status as one of the 7 New Natural Wonders of the World will bring the country more tourist dollars that it desperately needs. But with it will bring higher volumes of rubbish, and more environmental problems. What's more, I can see that all of my tourist money went to a small, high-earning population of hawkers who knew how to work the system, rather than those who I would have chosen to give it to.

Ha Long Bay has also been added to the 2012 World Monument Fund--dedicated to conserving world monuments that are under threat from human influences. I hope that the conservation projects hidden below the surface will soon become more visible than the rubbish floating in Ha Long Bay.

I would not recommend a tour of Ha Long Bay as a good tourist destination. At least, not for now. Go there and visit its shores on foot, but talk to the locals and support them from its shores. Ha Long bay needs some alone time ...