We enjoyed a few quiet days in Halong City, giving kids an opportunity to catch up on schoolwork and Alastair and I a chance to work on our own projects. Halong City was hit by Typhoon Yagie on September 7th, 2024. We had no idea how much damage had been done by the typhoon until visiting the city. We were staying in a high-rise apartment building, the staff a restaurant in the building shared that all the huge windows in the beautiful second-floor restaurant had been blown out by the typhoon, they have now all been replaced at huge expense. According to Wikipedia the death count was 323 people, with almost 2,000 injuries and over 34.5 billion USD damage. Throughout the city we saw evidence of businesses being destroyed and clearly see how the city is slowly trying to rebuild itself. We discovered a French Quarter that is clearly being developed as a high-end tourist location, unfortunately damage from the Typhoon has had a major impact on this development, hard to know how much the quiet streets in this area relate to low season and how many projects have been put on hold due to the cost of recovering from the damage of the Typhoon.
We enjoyed a visit to the Sun World Halong City’s amusement park. The Queen Cable Car, a huge cable car that holds the Guinness Book of world records for largest capacity at 258 people per gondola and highest tower, it runs from 1 peninsula to another and offers great views of the city and Halong Bay. Several of the rides at Sun World were closed and still needing repair, but the kids were thrilled to discover we could enjoy the two Fun Bobs repeatedly. We also got a clear picture of how culturally significant buildings and gardening tend to be integrated into the amusement parks in Asia.
