The Legacy of Green Spirit - Monthly Beach and Village Clean-up in Halong Bay

As always, V’Spirit Cruises, part of the Incredible Asia Journeys team, is making conscious efforts to protect our homeland from the environmental issues that it faces. We focus most of these efforts in Halong Bay, the gorgeous and totally unique seascape of smooth water and forest-topped limestone mountains. Amidst the beauty, the consistent problem of rubbish pollution looms large, with much of Halong Bay’s eco-system being badly affected by current and a history of careless practices.

Not only does this pollution look very unappealing in a seascape as romantic as Halong Bay, but its presence poses a serious threat to the future survival of many plant and animal species, a lot of which are endemic to the region. V’Spirit Cruises launched their Green Spirit initiative in 2014 as a means to secure the safety of the bay by switching to eco-friendly practices both on and off our cruises.

One of our off-cruise initiatives is our monthly clean-up program, where the dedicated Green Spirit team provides the simple but widely overlooked service of litter collection around the bay. We started the program in January 2014 with a cleaning of Soi Sim beach and Cua Van fishing village. Our enthusiastic team filled several rubbish bags full of litter found on the sand, across the shore and in the deep sea surrounding fishermen’s homes, explaining to the locals the need to properly dispose of rubbish for both their environmental and financial health.

At Green Spirit, we don’t believe that this is such a hard thing to accomplish. We realise that if everyone contributes a little, from recycling plastic water bottles to taking their rubbish with them when stopping at an attraction, then Halong Bay’s future will look both bright and green for the next generation of locals and visitors!