Tours from all part of northern Vietnam come for multiple day cruises that putter around the massive bay, occasionally docking to see caves, beaches and seaside restaurants. I stayed on board a ship for two days in a private room that was complete with a private bath and shower. The ships staff cooked fresh Vietnamese meals aboard, which were served in a shared dining room with a bar around low tables and cushy chairs. Activities including eating, drinking, tubing, touring, diving off the boat, swimming, spelunking and most often, just sitting passing the time with the boat’s other passengers and the stillness of the bay. Small row boats selling snacks, drinks and touristy trinkets weave between the ships and an occasional small boat with a begging family float by signaling you by rubbing their thumb and first finger together…the international sign for money.

Drinking an ice cold bottle of Hue Beer at midnight, watching the moon rise over the dark silhouettes of the limestone karsts, has been one of the most relaxing experience of my trip. Total price for a 4 hour shuttle from Hanoi (with return), three meals, and a private room on the ship set me back a cool $37.

The best way to book your trip is to wait until you land in Hanoi–or you’ll pay substantially more. All guest houses and hotels will be more than happy to sign you up for their Halong Bay Tour (even the night before). Keep in mind that its important to shop around and make sure all parties are clear on what the price includes (beer, shuttle, etc). The cheapest doesn’t often equal the best, especially in Vietnam. The competition is so great to get tourists, tour operators have been forced to cut corners because the competition has driven the price for the basic tour so low.

As in most travel, you do get what you pay for.

Also, you must take your passport with you, or they won’t let you on the boat. A group on my boat was sent home with no refund, because they’d left their passports in Hanoi. (Special thanks to Janny Leung for providing some of the photos below.)

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• See other photos of the cow from around-the-world and with new friends.
• Read the cow’s story

Train travel in Vietnam is safe, inexpensive, and a fantastic way to meet locals, while seeing a lot of the country. The food is delicious and there’s plenty of English across the country, so you’ll have no problem finding a place to eat or sleep.

Here are a few photos from the trip.

Click on the collage below (or right here) to see the entire photo gallery.

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• Learn all you need to take the train in Vietnam, from one of the absolute best travel sites out there: Seat 61.com.
• Read about My Tour of Duty in Vietnam
• Meet some friends from the train In This Picture: in Da nang, Vietnam
• See photos from my train trip: Across Japan by Bullet Train (Shinkansen)
• See photos of my trip across Cambodia by bus
• See all my photo galleries from my trip around-the-world

On board a passenger train I took from Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam headed north, we met Nguyen and his son Pak. The two shared a train cabin with us and we shared a little stuffed animal and some of our snacks.

Although they didn’t speak much English, Nguyen knew a few words from his time as a Vietnamese soldier in the Vietnam War (“The American War” to those in Vietnam). I fortunately spoke the language of “small child,” and we all got on rather well.

At every moment his dad left for the bathroom, Pak would turn into your typical 4-year old monster: jumping from bunk to bunk, throwing toys and making funny faces. “Kids everywhere, are kids,” my travels have taught me.

As I stepped off the train, Nguyen handed me a piece of paper with his email address scribbled in sloppy English. “Please,” he said, “Email the picture to my son.”

Seems people everywhere, are people too.

[In This Picture: A new series sharing the story behind a particular moment in time, capture in a single frame.]

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• Read about My Tour of Duty in Vietnam
• See a short video: What It’s Like: To Fire A Machine Gun In Vietnam
• Need a laugh? Check out Things That Make Me Laugh: Japan #1

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• Read about my Tour of Duty in Vietnam
• See past videos on ‘What It’s Like’:
  • In A Karaoke Bar in Hong Kong
  • To Fire A Machine Gun In Vietnam
  • To Climb Down The Temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia
  • To Walk Through a House in China
  • To Buy A Duck In China
  • In a Tibetan Dance Club

“American M41 Tank Destroyed By A Delay Mine In 1970″

The casualties were high: nearly 60,000 American troops, over 1 million military personnel from other countries and more than 2 million Vietnamese civilians—along with any semblance of a sound American foreign policy in Vietnam.

Thirty-five years later, I entered Vietnam with a backpack in a dust covered bus with a cracked windshield, and willingly paid money to crawl through the underground guerrilla tunnels that slithered beneath the dense foliage of the Vietnamese jungle; tunnels that most from my father’s generation would have paid large sums of money to never see.

‘Ironic’ doesn’t even begin to describe my experience in Vietnam. As I toured the Cu Chi Tunnels (i.e. The National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam’s [a.k.a. The Vietcong] base during the Tet Offensive), I tested out homemade “booby” traps used to spear American soldiers of my father’s generation, listened to our tour guide describe America’s horrific use of chemical weapons (the famed ‘agent orange’) on the northern Vietnamese, spent actual US dollar bills to pay to fire a fully-automatic machine gun, and even posed for photos with life sized Vietcong soldiers made of plastic.

Walking around Saigon, I discovered that only recently, in 2006, had the downtown museum once known as “The American and French Atrocities of War Museum” changed its name to the more politically correct “War Rememberance Museum.”

A train ride from south to north took me through places whose names I already knew, despite having never been here before: Saigon, The Mekong, Da Nang, and Hanoi among others.

As I traveled the country, images replayed over and over in my head of a war that happened a decade before my birth, but whose images and names live on in our collective popular culture from blockbuster movies to news stories drawing parallels with the present war in Iraq.

I tried to reconcile the images in my head with what I was seeing in front of me. At times my stomach turned, stuck between uneasiness and remorse, for a war fought on my behalf; as well as the realization that only a slightly different turn of events three decades earlier could have put my father in these very same jungles, with the same people (our tour guide was a former south Vietnamese solider), with the same machine guns and the same booby traps, but under entirely different circumstances.

The commodification of war imagery on 24-hour cable news stations and in our movies and video games tends to lead to a desensitization that makes the real seem unreal. And the farther from home the actual war and the more images we see, the more unreal I think it becomes to us.

But my time spent in Vietnam, seeing first hand what I once only knew through the eyes of Forrest Gump, took the unreal and made it real again. The experience not only brought the Vietnam War to life for me, but it also brought ALL wars to life and made me realize one reason we travel.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned so far in my travels is that people are people, and language and cultural differences aside, we are all more alike then we are led to believe. But its hard to see and understand that when our only spyglass into the world is through our televisions and the internet. In that sense, we turn to 24-hour cable news, newspapers and movies to inform us on how the world is and how different those other people really are. This is a mistake that can not be solved by reading more books or thinking a bit harder, as it’s only when we see these people and places for ourselves do we travel far enough to leave our own baggage and stereotypes behind.

So pack your suitcase, kiss your sweetheart goodbye, and fly on over here to Vietnam cause the DMZ awaits you. You’ve been drafted my friend. Please don’t run away or the casualties might include you.

The DMZ: Da Merchandising Zone in Ho Chi Min City’s Cu Chi tunnels.