Ha Long Bay & back to Hanoi

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November 29th 2008

Published: November 29th 2008

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DougRattray

View form the caves

My first real day with the Intrepid tour started with a breakfast at a restaurant staffed by street kids (sort of like Jamie Oliver's one but without all the media attention and backing). The service was really nice and the food was gorgeous. Saying that, all the food in Vietnam is gorgeous, you could give a newspaper to a Vietnamese chef and you'd be tempted to lick the plate.

An hour later we where on the road for a four hour ride to Ha Long Bay for our little minicruise aboard a Junk boat. Ha Long bay is a stretch of water with over 2000 little limestone islands dotted everywhere. The postcards and travel agents make it sound so secluded and romantic, the truth is that of the four million tourists that visit Vietnam each year over two million of them visit Ha Long Bay and sometimes it felt like they all chose to visit on the same day we did. Aboard we had lunch and sat around on the top deck admiring the view for a few hours before we were dropped off at the entrance to some limestone caves. The cave’s where quite interesting, lots of stalactites and

Our boat

stalagmites that if you squint hard enough might bare a slight resemblance to an animal.

That evening a few of us had a swim and got into a little bit of trouble for jumping in from the top deck of the boat which was about 25ft high before dinner followed by many hours of cards.

It took most of the morning to get back to Hanoi where we had the afternoon to do what we wanted. I joined a few people for a quick look around the Hanoi Hilton (the prison where a lot of POW’s where kept including presidential loser John McCain). It was all very interesting, but there seemed to be a lot of propaganda especially about how the American pilots were treated. I also had to go to the post office to send a few xmas presents back home which turned out to be a little complicated since I didn’t have a Vietnamese address and had to fill in 5 different forms.

After another amazing dinner we met up again at the hotel to catch the overnight train down to Hue (pronounced h’way as in “h’way the lads”). The 4 bed sleeper compartments where