In June 2024, travel filmmaker Harald Baldr — a YouTuber with 2.3 million subscribers who has spent years documenting everyday life in places most cameras skip — uploaded a nearly two-hour film about living in a floating fishing village on Lan Ha Bay, right next door to Cat Ba. It has since been watched more than half a million times.
Rather than clip his work into fragments, we've embedded the film here the proper way — straight from his channel, with our timestamps for the moments worth your lunch break. Every view counts on his channel, exactly as it should.
Why this village is worth two hours of anyone's time
The floating villages of Lan Ha Bay are not attractions that were built for visitors. Fishing families have lived on this water for centuries — houses on floats, fish pens under the floorboards, dogs asleep on the decks, a shop that comes to you by boat. A handful of homes now welcome overnight guests, which is how a foreign filmmaker ended up with a front-row seat to daily life most tourists cruise straight past.
What makes the film good is the patience. He doesn't narrate over the village; he just stays long enough for the village to carry on around him.
The three moments to watch first
1. How a house floats — from 6:55
The engineering section. You see exactly what's holding an entire home — kitchen, bedrooms, guard dog and all — above thirty metres of water, and why the whole structure shrugs off boat wake that would rattle anything built on posts.
2. The shop that comes to you — from 17:55
No streets means no corner store. Instead, a supply boat threads through the village selling vegetables, eggs, and household goods off the deck — a floating convenience store on its morning round. It's one of the most-replayed sections of the whole film, and once you've watched it you'll understand why.
3. Dinner, straight out of the bay — from 1:05:20
The evening meal: pork, tofu, and seafood that was swimming in the family's own pens an hour earlier, cooked and eaten on the deck as the light goes down. If you've ever wondered what "fresh seafood" actually means out here, this is the answer.
Got more time? Keep going
- 1:09:08 — the village after dark — house lights on black water, and the bay goes completely quiet.
- 1:14:37 — late-night shrimp fishing — heading out with the lamps after most of the village is asleep.
- 1:33:45 — the view from the summit — a scramble up the limestone for the full sweep of the bay.
See it with your own eyes
Everything in the film happens roughly an hour by boat from Cat Ba Town — and the same waters are where we run our own trips:
- 3-Day Floating Village Expedition — the closest thing to what the film shows: sleep on the water, eat from the pens, paddle the village lanes at your own pace.
- Dau Be Fishing Village Overnight — a 2-day, 1-night route built around a working fishing community in the far corner of Lan Ha.
- Lan Ha Floating Homestay — stay with a host family on the bay itself, no itinerary required.
Or just talk to us — our captains grew up on this water, and a few of the families in that film are neighbours.
The film above is © Harald Baldr, embedded from his official YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, watch it on YouTube and subscribe — footage like this deserves the view count.
