Vietnam Hanoi ( daily life ) , Halong Bay ( Sung Sot cave and fishermen village).

Hanoi daily life.

Hạ Long Bay (Vietnamese: Vịnh Hạ Long,  listen, literally: "descending dragon bay") is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a popular travel destination, in Quảng Ninh Province, Vietnam. Administratively, the bay belongs to Hạ Long City, Cẩm Phả town, and part of Vân Đồn District. The bay features thousands of limestone karsts and isles in various sizes and shapes. Hạ Long Bay is a center of a larger zone which includes Bái Tử Long bay to the northeast, and Cát Bà islands to the southwest. These larger zones share similar geological, geographical, geomorphological, climate, and cultural characters.
Hạ Long Bay has an area of around 1,553 km², including 1,960–2,000 islets, most of which are limestone. The core of the bay has an area of 334 km² with a high density of 775 islets.^[1] The limestone in this bay has gone through 500 million years of formation in different conditions and environments. The evolution of the karst in this bay has taken 20 million years under the impact of the tropical wet climate.^[2] The geo-diversity of the environment in the area has created biodiversity, including a tropical evergreen biosystem, oceanic and sea shore biosystem.^[3] Hạ Long Bay is home to 14 endemic floral species^[4] and 60 endemic faunal species.

Situated in the central zone of Ha Long Bay, Sung Sot cave is one of the largest and most beautiful caves here. It covers an area of 10 000 square meters at an altitude of 25m. Following the steep path under shady trees, visitors will reach the cave consisting of two chambers separated by the 3m-wide path. The outer chamber is square, the ceiling of which is filled with fabulous stalactites. Different from the outer chamber, the inner one is vast with capacity for thousands of people. It features formations shaped like fairy tales. For example, in the middle of the chamber stands a formation resembling a general surveying his troops.

There are four residential areas of fishermen living on the bay, about 400 households totaling approximately 1.000 people. The fishermen live on boats and floating wooden houses in the core-zone of Ha Long Bay, which is dozens of kilometers away from the mainland. They have no home or land ownership and their main livelihood is fishing and aquaculture. The first two fishing villages were formed in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and they were called Giang Vong and Truc Vong. Due to rising waters, the people made homes from boats, though they maintained an ancestral shrine on the mainland. For village meetings they simply dropped anchor. From 1946 to 1954, during the war against the French, the people scattered among various islands, and returned to rebuild their floating villages when the region was stabilized. Their decendents are the people of the four current villages in Halong Bay“ Cửa Vạn, Ba Hang, Cống Tàu and Vông Viêng. Cua Van is the largest, with about 185 households. The fisherman of these floating villages take pride in their roles as messengers, combatants during conflict, and transporters.