Food Poisoning in Halong Bay

Why Getting Sick Isn't Always a Travel Disaster

If you are going to get food poisoning, I highly recommend doing so while chilling on a junk in Halong Bay, Vietnam.

Halong Bay was one of the places I was most excited to go with my family. I had also heard horror stories of scams, bad food, worse beds, and a hit-or-miss mentality to picking a company to go with. In the end, we ended up staying at a backpacker (Thu Giang Guesthouse) hotel in Hanoi's Old Quarter (very simple; good location; helpful staff). We planned to stay at this place both before and after our trip to Halong Bay, and I decided to let the hotel staff pick a company in our price range (which was on the budget end of the scale, but not rock bottom).

This strategy turned out to work well for us as we were quite happy with what we got.

But I am getting ahead of myself here.

After checking into our hotel in Hanoi and getting them to book a two-day, one-night cruise in Halong Bay, we headed out to experience Hanoi. The traffic, the temples, the energy, the museums, the crumbling colonial architecture, the beautiful tree-lined lanes. Wow. Hanoi is wonderful.

But the food was our favorite part. This was our first time digging into food in Vietnam, and it blew us away. We ate broken rice with pork belly. We slurped pho and bun bo nam bo. We were introduced to banh xeo which immediately became one of our favorite foods.

And then we had bun cha.

Bun cha is Vietnamese pork meatballs with noodles. Our bun cha came with not only pork, and herbs, and fish sauce, but also with some kind of bug that sent all five of us running to the toilet off and on for the next three days.

Hanoi was one of only a few places where we managed to get all five of us in the same room. At first, we thought this was great. But let's just say it would have been nice to have two bathrooms for the five of us to use that night.

And the next day we had to board a bus for the ride to Halong Bay. We did what all travelers do: took an overdose of Imodium, said a desperate prayer, repeated the traveler's mantra of "everything always works out," and got on the bus for a few hours.

And everything did work out. We made it to our boat without incident.

And for the next two days we laid on the deck of the boat, watching some of the most impressive scenery I have ever seen slowly slide by. Every now and then, one of us would jump up from his or her deck chair, run to our cabin, and return a few minutes later.

It was the perfect situation to have tummy troubles.

In some circumstances, I don't even care if I am sick. Because travel is all about weighing costs and benefits.

Daughter 3 taking in the scenery from the boat

Ha Long Bay

Ha Long Bay