Halong Bay

Our first stop out of Hanoi was actually a package trip out and back. It was a three day excursion to Halong Bay, a vast expanse of bright blue sea, full of craggy islands and rocks all covered in jungle vegetation with sheer cliffs every side. The statistic was something like 998 Islands, most of which have not had a human foot set upon them. It is a limestone formation and something you would think was made up if you saw it in a movie.

Naturally, having booked our tour in Hanoi, we were fully prepared to be ripped off but all in all it wasn't too bad. It was a three day trip. Day one began with getting a minibus for the three hour drive and listening to this American twit explaining why everything in the world was as it is for the best part of the journey, then trying his best pick up lines on our unimpressed guide. We arrived at the dock and after an unexpected reshuffling with another minibus of passengers we got on our boat with our guide, but not the American. Our boat was a big wooden endeavour, mimicking the style of the oriental junkets of legends, the kind of thing you might see Sinbad sailing. There were ten of us and we would spend about 24 hours on board, we had a cabin down below. There was a small deck area at the bow and upstairs was the restaurant which impressed everyone with its freshly caught seafood, though our vegetarian alternative was a little less satisfying. We bobbed around passed all the amazing scenery and then stopped at the aptly named 'Amazing Cave' which was pretty massive, in fact seemed bigger than the Island it was on. It had been pretty well lit too, though the concrete paths leading us through did detract slightly from it's authenticity. Not half as much though as the thousands of people sharing it with us. The bay is a massive revenue earner, and there are hundreds of boats just like ours (a few a little bit better looking than ours) all plying the waves. The competency of the captains is utterly dreadful, with no end of collisions between the boats, not all of them slow or gentle collisions either. They sail like they drive. We moored for the night in a central spot where lots of other boats all moored up together too and saw out a thunder storm as it soaked the deck and sent everyone into the restaurant or down to their cabins. We were lucky and had a good sleep though not everyone could say the same, an Australian couple we met, Ben and Jo, had the cabin that let the water pour in all night, a problem the crew had obviously had for some time because they had a perfectly sized piece of tarpaulin which they had pulled out without prompting and laid over their roof area before the rain got too bad, but to no avail.

The following day was an early start and we were off the boat with all our bags and onto a smaller boat that would take us to a site to go Kayaking. We could have picked that activity or Mountain Biking but thought that in the heat of the day the water might be more pleasant. We also thought that we would have had a guide or something but instead were left to our own devices to explore the shipping channels and currents in our semi sunk kayak with broken paddles. It was quite good fun though and we had more of the same in the afternoon, having had lunch and a swim in between the two. Day two ended with a hotel on Katbah Island, the biggest and most populated island in the reserve. The hotel was particularly nice and was enough to make us forget the small problems and sum the whole trip up with a thumbs up when we returned to the mainland the following day and were minibused home via a pretty nice restaurant for lunch. All in all, the trip was pretty good value considering all the food was paid for and we had no accommodation costs for three days.

We returned to Hanoi, caught a taxi and made it to the airport where due to a wide range of excuses including 'late arrival', 'engineering difficulties' and 'the plane not quite being ready yet' we eventually left for Hue, further south in Vietnam.