Ha Long Bay ... continue

I just wrote about our journeys the last two times we visited Ha Long Bay, then ten days later, a disaster struck. A few days ago, while searching the net, I found on Yahoo news that there was a tourist boat sunk in Ha Long Bay, and twelve tourists perished in that incident.

It's so sad that such a beautiful place had to witness such a terrible loss of lives. And horrifically, all of those lives were taken away from young people in their mid twenties. As I wrote earlier about the carelessness, and self-destruction of the people running the place. Sooner or later, disaster will bound to happen.

Tracking back with more research, to my dismay, I found a couple more of these incidents had happened in the past as well. Not too long ago, in the fall of two thousand and nine, another tourist boat had sunk in the same vicinity with the lost of more than ten lives. In this case, it happened to a very new and very luxury boat, which did not have a license to stay overnight at sea. To most of the local authorities during many interviews, the dumbstruck was, to them, the newer, and more luxury the boats is the safer it is as well.

On our next coming trip, we had planed to come visiting this place for a final time. But after hearing this new, it changes our plan. We now are not so sure about booking a trip there. Even if we do, I don't know I want to stay overnight in one.

This is not only an isolated incident that happened only every now and then according to the law of numbers. But they happen in a regular basis. The Vietnamese people are very friendly and fun loving people, but at the same time they are the most careless people in term of taking care for their safety and others'.

Just like every where else on this earth, Ha Long Bay will face the same fate under the destruction of human. People have done the most damages to the mother earth in the last hundred years alone. We all want to live the luxury lifestyles of the rich, but we forget one thing, and that's the high price we have to pay for these lifestyles. And soon enough, if we don't change our ways of abusing the nature, our children will have never had a chance. To a certain extend, if we don't change now, the damage would be irreversible.

Would it be too late already?