Surely others have some reactions...

On Friday we traveled, along with our travel agent and her fearless 11-year-old son, to Halong Bay, known to art film lovers around the world as the setting of Indochine and, to people like me, as the spot for a crucial scene in Tomorrow Never Dies: where James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) and Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) prepare to sneak aboard Carver's (Jonathan Pryce) ship to stop him from starting a war between China and the United States in order to improve the ratings of his Rupert Murdoch-esque media empire.

It's a popular area, which raises the question, why would Carver choose Halong Bay for engaging in this unprecedented act of global espionage? Did he want 007 to stop him? We all know people who are tragic self-saboteurs, fearful of success and willing to undermine themselves as they sit on the edge of some personal or professional victory. Indeed, any number of Bond villains have seemed to fit the bill, openly courting disaster by telling a physically restrained Bond their plan for global domination/destruction before they leave Bond, mostly unsupervised, to perish. Carver's media savvy and business skill would seem to imply that that he didn't in fact want Bond to stop him, but plotting an attack by hiding in Halong Bay seems about as shrewd a decision as trying to blend in by wearing a Yankees cap at Fenway park at a rivalry game in September. It makes no sense. One can't hide in Halong Bay, not these days.

There are hundreds of tourist-filled junks in the water, with several "floating market" rowboats attached like barnacles to the hull of each. Needless to say, the women in these rowboats have mastered at least a subset of English, catering to the foreign tourists who line the upper decks, occasionally plunging (as most of our group did, at one point or another) off the top and into the warm water of the bay. I was the guilty party in my group, rewarding myself for momentarily overcoming my fears of heights and sharks (none have been sighted in the bay for decades, by the way) by purchasing pizza-flavored Pringles, "Choco Pies" (a delicacy in my not-exactly-native-but-sure-seems-like-it-when-I'm-trying-to-speak-Vietnamese-and-everything-comes-out-in-Japanese Japan), and Oreos from one of the women shortly after my own leap from the deck. This meant that I had to overcome my fear of suspiciously soggy processed food in choking down a few of the Pringles, though I patted myself on the back for the moral victory of supporting women who seemed to have a very difficult life - rowing their boats all the way from an urban center to our junk to cater to my fast food fix. One of my vastly more knowledgeable colleagues pointed out that the women had almost certainly been towed out to the bay by a boat, and they seemed to enjoy hanging out and chatting with one another whenever not hawking their sundries to the swimmers.

Like many vacation spots, Halong Bay is equally fascinating for its astonishing physical beauty -- words, or at least my words, can't really describe the effect of the limestone cliffs rising dramatically out of the water, or of the brilliantly red sunset as the light dies behind one of the towers, or of the unnerving scope

of the Hang Đầu Gỗ cavern -- and for its larger social implications. Some of the environmental consequences of massive tourism are obvious, as are the economic implications: from the middle-class jobs provided to the tour guides, to the skilled and semi-skilled positions on boats, as well as to the people scraping by on souvenir sales on the dock. While the tourists may be a polyglot lot, English seems to be the lingua franca for those seeking to make a buck from them, and there's fierce competition. A bottle of wine or beer purchased from a floating market vendor is probably a few bucks less for a junk owner, who sells them in the canteen. Partly as a result the serenity of the natural environment -- on the junk, I managed the first really good night's sleep since I arrived in Vietnam ten days ago -- contrasts with the frenetic activity surrounding its economic exploitation. Whether it's the string of "excuse me..." entreaties by the women in their floating market rowboats, or the shrieks from junk passengers as their friends would jump from 20- or 30-foot decks into the water, or the un-chik-un-chik techno beat of a remix of Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Nots" coming from a neighboring junk lit up like a carnival, Halong Bay is identifiably an aural ecosystem that features humans at the top of the food chain. Which, again, makes it astounding that one can feel so much at peace -- and so small -- there.

Thanks to Japanese development assistance, getting to Halong Bay from Hanoi is easy and convenient: roughly three-and-a-half hours by bus on smooth, straight highways. The roads themselves tell a story, from the upscale housing developments, even gated communities, within relatively easy commuting distance from Hanoi, to the smaller towns featuring new construction of extraordinarily narrow three-storey homes with bright green and gold facades next to the ubiquitous bia hơi joints. Each collection of buildings would stop after several hundred yards, leading to a mile or so of rice paddies, still being tilled by hand, with the occasional water buffalo dipping in and out of warm, murky ponds. In and out, we stopped at massive rest stops with sparkling bathrooms, cold-drink vendors, and massive emporia of local tourist kitsch: aisles of jade, garden statues, paintings, and the occasional bottle of snake wine, each with a dead cobra festively holding a scorpion in its mouth. Without exaggeration, I could have spent a full day in one of these places without getting bored, my natural restlessness notwithstanding.

So it's easy and even fun to get in and out of Halong Bay, but not easy enough for many Hanoi residents. No time, no money, said one friend here to one of our Vietnamese-speaking colleagues when he asked her if she'd been out to Halong Bay. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me; I'm American but I've never been to the Grand Canyon and haven't seen the Rockies except from an airplane on clear day. But it's a reminder that the 8% annual growth rate that Vietnam has been experiencing for the past decade or so may depend on those Japanese-funded roads, and on the foreign visitors who buy Pringles after jumping off the top of a junk, and on the fees we pay to travel agents, junk owners, and resort managers, but it still leaves a large gap between what we visitors experience and how many Vietnamese get to see their own country. For many Vietnamese, the things visitors do and take for granted (including using the wi-fi in a Highlands Coffee joint while sipping a lime juice), are, for the moment at least, anything but everyday activities.

None of this answers my own central question about Halong Bay: Carver was clearly modeled on a combination of both Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates, with his most potent weapon being his formidable intelligence. So why choose Halong Bay as one's hiding place before heading for the most audacious act of terror in world history, starting a nuclear war between China and the United States? I mean, one might just as well ask whether such a war would in fact be good for business, given how many heads have rolled now that the implosion of the mortgage-backed securities market has revealed that, in the end, the people of the world now collectively owe a sum greater than the total value of the earth. While I'm no economist, I can't help but believe that a global thermonuclear apocalypse might have even more severe ramifications for business. But particularly after visiting Halong Bay, in all its dramatic and complex glory, I can't help but believe that Tomorrow Never Dies was less realistic than I initially took it to be. Next summer, I plan to get to research whether a Camaro really can turn into a giant robot (and whether that robot really would be friendly, as most Camaro drivers are not) as well as whether Tom Hanks really would be able to save the Vatican if someone had the antimatter necessary to destroy it.

I know that our seminar students have far better photos of the trip than I've posted here, and I hope that they'll put a few online and add their own reflections on this extraordinary trip.