Beyond Ha Long Bay

Stay ashore to brew coffee, buy pearls, dine in a cave and take in the relaxed ambience of low season in Ha Long City

- Akshita Nanda Correspondent

Legend says dragons seeded Ha Long Bay with pearls. Today, microsurgery at pearl farms injects modernity into myth.

On a floating wooden platform sheltered by millennia-old limestone formations, oysters are wrested from the briny waters of the bay. I watch as a mollusc is teased open with forceps and implanted with a seed — a small irritant. The oyster should now secrete chemicals around the seed in layers, eventually forming a pearl.

As one employee at Ha Long Pearl Farm delicately pokes the oyster, another twists a knife into a second one and shakes out a lustrous pearl.

"In a few months, that other oyster may also give us a pearl," she says, washing the jewel in clean water. "If we are lucky, maybe more than one."

An hour’s boat ride away, Ha Long City is being seeded with new offerings to attract and retain tourists, who usually spend most of their time on the UNESCO-listed waters.

In 2025, the city launched a musical fountain and luxury property. Other construction projects in the same vein dot the Ha Long marina, which lies west of tourist hub Bai Chay.

City and bay are mirror opposites in more ways than one. The bay is claimed by thousands of day-trippers. The land, however, is described on online forum Reddit as a “ghost town”, with multiple million-dollar hotels left vacant and abandoned.