Trang An is a landscape of limestone towers rising out of flat green water and rice paddies in Ninh Binh province, in northern Vietnam, rowed through on wooden sampans that pass beneath the hills through caves and past the site of the country's first capital. The towers are the same rock as Ha Long Bay, a hundred kilometres away, but here they stand on land, in a maze of rivers, lakes and flooded fields rather than sea; people call it Ha Long Bay on land, and the difference is the quiet. The boats are rowed by local women, and on the Ngo Dong River at Tam Coc many of them row with their feet, leaning back and working the oars with their legs while their hands are free, a habit that began because the days are long. You settle into a low sampan and glide down still channels into the mouths of long caves that run under the hills, ducking beneath stalactites in the cool dark for minutes at a time before the far end opens back onto daylight and a new valley of rock and water.
At Hoa Lu two low stone temples mark where the Dinh and Le kings ruled a newly independent Vietnam a thousand years ago, with the karst peaks around them serving as the city's walls; the capital moved to Hanoi in 1010, and the ring of hills stayed. For the view from above, Hang Mua is a karst ridge climbed by 486 stone steps to a carved stone dragon stretched along the summit, with the whole floodplain below: the towers, the rivers between them and the boats moving like insects. The paddies between the towers turn gold at the two rice harvests, around May and June and again in autumn, often under a collar of morning mist. Parts of the film Kong: Skull Island were shot among these towers, and the boatwomen will point out where. Trang An is Ha Long Bay without the sea, and the boat goes where the sea cannot, under the hills.