Halong Bay, Viet Nam

Every year, the MCC Laos staff take a holiday together—all foreigners and nationals, all adults and children. For us, this was a wonderful time to be together with the national staff in a place where we could all be foreigners together. I would not wish to overstate the matter, but I think it is reasonable to say that the very state of being a foreigner is by far and away the most difficult thing of our being here or, indeed, being in a place. This year, MCC travelled together to Viet Nam, and for us this was a singularly rewarding time of being foreigners together for a time, however brief.
We travelled overland by bus to the coast of Viet Nam and, after a brief stop in Vinh, we drove up to Halong Bay, in northern Viet Nam. Halong Bay is a waterbody filled with islands and caves which, like the caves of northern Laos, served as the bases of the early communist revolutionaries.