“Get your ass up here, Emily!”

Kristen’s voice spilled out across the water and echoed back to me on the deck below. I leaned out over the guardrail, craning my neck and blinking into the sun.

“C’mon, we can jump in together!” I spotted her silhouetted in the sky, crouched at the edge of the boat’s upper deck and smiling down at me. She looked like an angel, the biblical kind, powerful and a bit terrifying. “It’s not even that high.”

“Hang on, I’m coming up,” I yelled. Vietnam suited us. I was worried things would feel different between us now that she’d left Milwaukee, but Kristen and I had picked up exactly where we left off. And so far, this trip had felt like a colorful dream: hitching rides on motorbikes, sitting on tiny plastic stools and slurping up soup, hiking across mountains carved by farmers into swirling bright-green tiers.

I headed back inside the boat and lost my bearings momentarily; though we’d been on the main cruise ship, a forty-passenger thing with tiny rooms and a fat upper deck, for three days now, this was our first time on this tender. When we’d stopped on a beach to swim, at a cave to explore, and at a floating pearl farm to be rowed around by a stoic, thick-armed Vietnamese woman, we were ferried about in a zippy Zodiac. For today’s excursion, on this roomy tender, clumps of people sat on plastic chairs sipping sweaty cans of Saigon beer.

We’d docked here for lunch—more deep-fried seafood and tropical fruits the color of Skittles. And of course, some fast eaters were taking the opportunity to jump into the sapphire water. I never thought of us as cruise people, but a boat was the only way to enter Ha Long Bay, an area of northern Vietnam immortalized on the cover of our dog-eared travel guide. The cruise ship’s clientele was a mix of young folks backpacking across southeast Asia and Gen X Europeans spending two to four weeks exploring Vietnam. With our limited PTO days, Kristen and I were smashing everything the country had to offer into a two-week marathon.

There was a splash behind me and I saw another passenger bobbing in the water. It was Jenna, one half of a Brazilian couple we’d befriended. They were both so intimidatingly gorgeous, Kristen and I had a private running gag about how they were the nation’s ugliest denizens, forced to settle for each other.

I reached the top deck and sunlight seized me. I was excited for this afternoon’s activity: kayaking among the huge karsts, or limestone islets, that studded the bay. Kristen had wanted to do a scuba diving excursion instead, but the thought of being below the water’s surface, with fake lungs strapped on my back, terrified me. It was one of the rare activities Kristen couldn’t cajole me into doing.

A wolf pack of Australian boys on a gap year kept tearing up the stairs and leaping off the edge in a big splashy circle, and I moved to let two roar by.

“Come on, Emily!” Kristen waved me over. “It’s really not that high.”

I stopped short of the edge. “Liar!”

“Fine, I’ll go first. Count me down.”

“Three, two—” But she seized me on One and we were airborne together, holding hands and flying through the hot crystal air, and when we crashed into the water it was like a key change, a new world, and together we surfaced, giggling.

Kristen would be in the back of the kayak—that was a given, the trusty navigator setting our course. Deckhands helped us dangle our legs off the boat and into our yellow vessel.

“Come back in one hour and we go back to the ship,” Duc, our tour guide, said. He was tiny and flamboyant, with a poof of silky black hair.

Kristen pushed off with her paddle. “See ya then!”

“How will we know when an hour is up?” I asked her, twisting around in my seat. It was hard with the life vest, which rode up to my neck and smelled like mildew.

“It’ll be fine. Less talking, more paddling.”

She chose a karst at random and we chatted as we paddle. It was like being on another planet, like slipping into a sci-fi movie—everywhere, as far as the eye could see, limestone karsts rose out of the water like pagan monoliths. Thick, jungly vegetation frosted the tops, and we could see caves like mouths yawning at us from some of them. Kristen let out a sudden whoop and it fractured out among the infinite isles. I giggled and followed suit, channeling my happiness into my lungs.

We reached a far-off island, as fat as a skyscraper, and Kristen turned to the left so we could circle it clockwise. We were still chatting, still rhythmically dipping our paddles in the water and splashing our knees as we glided. Seawater dripped over the lotus flower tattoo I’d gotten on my ankle a few days earlier—a match with Kristen’s. Her idea, but already I loved it.

“Somehow this place makes me feel both huge and small,” I observed, calling back over my shoulder.

“I know exactly what you mean.”

We headed for another karst, buoyant and bursting. I had the sense that our trawler was behind us, that we’d circled half that first karst and were moving to the right now. My arms begin to tire.

I glanced at her. “Should we start heading back?”

There was an odd look on her sunburned face. Beneath her sunglasses, she was frowning. She tugged at the end of the ponytail. “Do you see the boat?”

I looked around—slowly at first, then with added vigor. “I don’t even see any other kayaks.”

“Shit.”

We both stared, squinting, willing one of the orange or yellow kayaks to appear. Birds soared and looped around the isles; waves lapped against the rock.

We were utterly, completely alone.

“Kristen.” I fought to keep my voice under control. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t we come from that way?” She pointed.

I crinkled my brow. “I thought it was that way. Isn’t that the island we went around?”

Suddenly there were a dizzying number of them, row after row after row in every direction, like a pop-up book with infinite layers. My sunburn started to sting; my heart galloped against the life vest.

“It’s okay. Don’t freak out.” She tapped the paddle resting over her shins. “They’re not gonna let us die out here.”

“I’m not worried about dying,” I snapped, though I kind of was. “I’m afraid they’re going to have to call in a rescue operation and we’ll be on the hook for, like, forty-thousand dollars.”

“We’re in Vietnam, Em. It’ll be half that at most.” She finished with a crooked grin and I glared at her.

“Do you think we should just stay still? Isn’t that the first rule if you get lost?”

“I don’t know. If we split the difference of where you and I think we came from, it’s that general direction.” She sliced her palm through the air. “Let’s at least get to the other side of that massive karst. Maybe we can see the boat from there.”

My arms hurt. Blisters sprang up on my palms and stinging saltwater found them all. We paddled and paddled until we got to the other side and—

Nothing. The exact same landscape, jagged rocks plopped in the ocean as far as the eye can see.

“Now what?” My voice shook. The sun was definitely lower now—it’d been more than an hour for sure.

“Let’s just go to the next rock.” She pointed again. She sounded less sure now. “We’ll go there and if we don’t see anything, we’ll wait. I mean, our kayak is yellow, our life jackets are orange. They won’t just leave us here.”

We had no whistles, no lights, nothing to attract attention. Soon the sun would set and we’d be a dark silhouette in a craggy black abyss. We hadn’t brought water, let alone food. I lifted my paddle because what else was I going to do?

We were silent as we navigated around another karst, the only sound the steady wet crash of our oars dipping into the water. I was hot now, and hungry and thirsty and tired.

“I see something!” Kristen cried. I stopped paddling and looked where she was pointing.

It was a cruise ship, like the one we’d been sleeping on. A shiny white blob in the distance.

“Is that ours?”

“Who cares?” she replied, her voice jubilant. “It’s civilization. Someone there will speak English, and they can contact our boat, and we’ll be okay!”

“God, it’s far,” I sighed.

“Now’s not the time to complain,” she replied. “Ready?”

The waves were bigger now, the wind pushing us away. It felt like we had to row five feet to gain just one. But we kept moving. My pecs burned. My traps cried out. My soggy butt and sunburned knees and thirsty tongue all took turns crying out to me, but we kept paddling, paddling, paddling. Warily we rolled along because we could not stand to wait—and we could not wait to stand.

“That’s our ship!” Kristen shrieked as we got closer. I didn’t answer, just gritted my teeth and kept rowing. How long ago did we leave the ship to board the tender? What corner of the bay is this, deep enough for cruise ships, not meant for little dinghies—let alone our two-man kayak?

I paused, breathing hard, and glanced at my reflection in the water. A white moon bobbed to the surface and I stared at it for a second before it made sense: a jellyfish. Beautiful. I could only see its smooth round top, not the tentacles below. The dangly yarns that’d wrap around you, hook you with barbed stingers and inject its venom.

“Keep paddling!” Kristen called, and I got back to it. The ship was definitely getting closer now. A worker appeared on the deck and we both waved our arms and cried out into the expanse between us: “Hey!”

He turned and went back inside and we both sputtered in surprise. Then he reappeared with another employee, also compact and black-haired and probably busy preparing our dinner or cleaning our cabins, and we waved again. This time they waved back and we cheered—salvaged, salvation was ours.

Somehow they hoisted us up onto a cruise ship that was never meant for kayaks, and they yanked our little scull behind us. No one on the boat spoke English but they radioed Duc, whose relief was audible even in the musical tones of Vietnamese. Finally they handed us the walkie-talkie and Duc laughed as he told us the tender was on its way back to us.

“That was terrifying,” I told Kristen as I changed out of my bikini. She was crouched at the mini-fridge in our room, rifling through cans and bottles.

She turned around and handed me a Heineken. “Oh, c’mon. We knew we were going to be fine.”

“What if we weren’t?” “We were! Because we’re great together. And now it’s just a hell of a story.” She popped her can open and clinked it against mine. “To future Kremily adventures.” She lifted it high. “May the good times always roll.”