Just off the coast of Ly Son island there is another smaller island. My wife tells me that the name of it is "Dao Be", which literally means "the little island".
After spending one day touring around on Ly Son island, we went to Dao Be Island on the next day.
From Ly Son, we took the ferry over.
And then arrived at the little island.
From the little island, you can see the big island in the distance.
Right from the first stop at the port, on all sides was gorgeous scenery.
I noticed the other tourists pointing into the water at the port, and looked down to see that you could see swarms of fish swimming around in clusters in the crystal clear water. I tried to get a picture, but unfortunately the reflection from the water makes the photo appear blurry.
We then got into a small golf cart.
I tried to object that I could totally walk around this small island, but we were all getting hurried into the cart so fast that I didn't really have time to object.
He took us to another scenic outlook a bit further down the island.
As you can see from the above pictures, there was a lot of picture taking going on all around.
Not just me, but all of the other young Vietnamese tourists were frantically snapping selfies and pictures.
I had a brief moment of panic when I began to get worried that we were all so obsessed with taking pictures that none of us were actually enjoying the place.
"In 2 days I'm going to be back in Saigon," I thought to myself. "Trapped in traffic jams and smoke and working every day under fluorescent lights. And I'm going to go back to looking at other people's vacation photos on Facebook, and feeling envious and wishing I was away from my computer. But here I am in a truly gorgeous place, and what am I doing? Spending the whole time obsessed with getting Facebook photos for my computer."
This is the dilemma of travelling in the modern age. Do you document the vacation, or do you enjoy the vacation? And can you do both?
I've blogged about this once before actually. To quote myself from January 2016:
On a recent trip to Dalat (Highland areas in Southern Vietnam) I was struck by how all the other tourists around me were more concerned about getting the perfect photos than they were about actually enjoying where they were. It's like the experience of seeing and doing stuff while travelling has been completely replaced by the obsession to catch pictures of everything.My wife wanted me to pose for several pictures, and at one point I actually refused, and lectured her on how we needed to spend some time enjoying this place as well as taking pictures. (Although as you can see from above, I also took plenty of pictures myself.)
Mind you, I say this as someone who was part of the problem. I was just as obsessed as everyone else was with getting pictures. (I took 151 photos of Dalat, all of which I immediately dumped onto Facebook as soon as I got back home to Saigon.)
It's a bit of a catch 22, because if you're so busy taking photos, you're not really there. But if you don't take the photos, you have no record of being there.
I was debating jotting down a few thoughts about this phenomenon. But Uproxx.com has already published the perfect article on the whole thing
Is Instagram Ruining Backpacker Culture?
She seemed a bit hurt, and I'm not sure she completely understood.
I wonder... I've been reading a lot of articles about how the obsession with taking photos is ruining vacations (such as the above Uproxx article I linked to). But I wonder if this is just a Western thing. Are there also articles published in Vietnamese about how too many photos are ruining the vacation experience, or is this just not a concern over here?
At any rate, it turned out in the end that I was panicking for no reason. Although I was initially worried that in the mad dash for photos, we would all leave this place without having enjoyed it, it turned out that even after everyone had taken all the photos they wanted, we still had a good 10-15 minutes to just soak up the scenery before we got back on the golf cart for the next destination.
The next destination was another scenic coastal area.
Next, we were taken to a coral reef, where we did some snorkeling and saw the coral and some tropical fish.
I have no pictures at all for this section. Which I guess maybe is fitting considering all my angst about excessive picture taking above.
There was a small changing area, where we could change into our swim suits and lock our valuables in lockers.
Then we went down to the water and swam around for a little bit.
Then a boatman rowed us out in a small boat to the coral reef, and gave us diving masks, and we could swim around and see the coral and the fish.
I had done snorkeling in a coral reef before one time in Cambodia (in an island of Sihanoukville) but the water there had not been crystal clear like the water here on this island. Nor had there been a lot of tropical fish at Sihanoukville island.
So I can honestly say I've never done anything like this before. The water was crystal clear, the coral was beautiful, and there were so many brightly colored fish.
I attempted to swim down to see the fish better, but I found it difficult to get deep under the water.
I later compared notes with other friends, and apparently the buoyancy of salt water makes it difficult to dive down. (I grew up in the Midwest, so I never really experienced this before.)
But I did my best. I held my breath, did my best to kick down and fight the buoyancy, and tried to stay under for as long as I could.
After about 30 minutes or so, my wife and the boatman suggested we head back.
Since we were not all that far away from the shore, I suggested I swim back rather than get back in the boat.
I was in the mood for some more exercise, and besides I had been a long distance swimmer in high school, so I figured maybe I could do it.
For caution's sake, the boatman didn't let me get too far away from him, so I swam alongside the boat the whole time.
...high school was a long time ago, and I actually got pretty tired on the swim back.
But more so than getting tired, I had forgotten about how your body can cramp up during long swims. By the end, I couldn't hold my fingers together as I pushed my arms through the water.
I did make it back to the shore, but I'm not sure I could have gone much further.
At this point, we had overstayed our time slightly, and my wife was worried we wouldn't make it back to catch the ferry instead.
We changed clothes quickly, and caught the golf cart for a quick ride over the island and back to the ferry port. I took a video.
Quang Ngai Dao Be (Little Island)
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