Advertisement
Published: February 17th 2009
Hanoi was a great place to enter into the unexpected and vast differences that Vietnam has to offer compared to the rest of Southeast Asia. The cities are even crazier busy with motorbikes, bicycles, bicycle food carts, cars and such than in Thailand. The people are less patient, more grabby, and love to honk their horns, but Hanoi was great and we stayed a bit longer than we'd intended. We were enjoying ourselves so much that we did not bother to book our trip to Halong Bay until last minute. So, instead of going with a well-known company, we found some lady who spoke good English and seemed trustworthy and sweet. Well, she screwed us over!
Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island Itinerary:
Day 1:
7:45a - 8:30a - Pick-up in hotel lobby and bus ride to Halong City.
11:45a - Arrive in Halong, board the boat and eat lunch aboard while passing the islands of Halong Bay.
1:45p - 1 Hour of exploring caves and grottos, swimming optional.
2:45p - Cruise to Cat Ba Island and get picked up for a 45 minute bus ride through Cat Ba National Park.
5p - Check-in
Halong Bay
Coming up to Fisherman's Village.at hotel.
6p - A guide will meet you in the hotel lobby for some fishing.
7:30p - Eat your catch! Or dinner provided if you weren't so lucky fishing.
Enjoy the rest of the night with free time on Cat Ba Island.
Day 2:
7am - Breakfast
8:15a - Head back to the boat and cruise back to Halong Bay.
11:20a - Enjoy lunch in Halong City.
12:45p - Board the bus to head back to Hanoi.
4:15p - Arrive in Hanoi.
Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island ACTUAL Itinerary:
Day 1:
7:50a - Get picked up in the hostel lobby by a man (the tour guide?) who is yelling at us to hurry up, while pinching and pushing Maren in attempt to make us all move faster, or the bus will leave us.
8:30a - The tour guide on the bus introduces himself to the bus as our tour guide...except for these four (pointing to us)...and says, "Now will everyone, except these four, introduce yourselves to the rest of the bus who you'll be spending the next two days with in Halong Bay." Apparently spending
Halong Bay
Fisherman's Village the next 3 1/2 hours on the bus with all these people did not warrant a need for our names.
10a - A stop off at the Humanities Center, where handicrafts are made by under-priveledged children (with i-pods), then sold at outrageous prices.
12p - Arrive at Halong Bay, pay to use the bathroom, then wait around for our tour guide, who we were told would find us, and she did, then drag ourselves and our bags onto the boat.
12:30p - Arrive at Fisherman's Village to look at lots of sea creatures, while being coaxed to buy them.
12:45p - Eat lunch, which was actually really good!
1:45p - Get on a small boat to go out to the caves, then 1/2 way there start being asked for 85,000 Dong* to enter the caves. We try explaining that it's included in our tour, but they say, "Not these caves." So they turn the small boat around and send, us four, back aboard the big boat to wait for the 'included' caves.
2p - The small boat returns with a boat-full of slightly more poor and greatly disappointed passengers...not worth the Dong* we're told.
Halong Bay
Monkey Island 2:15p - Start cruising towards Monkey Island, which turns out not to have any of the promised 32 species of monkeys on it, but instead is a giant rock formation jutting out of the bay that is formed in the shape of a giant gorilla, or Donkey Kong. Continue to cruise to the 'included' caves.
2:30p - Arrive at the caves that we're actually allowed to enter and find that they are ridiculous. They have multi-colored flourecent lighting, look extremely fake and have 'natural' springs that some how burst out of the rock in gravity defying ways. We trek (they love that word here!) around the caves, getting yelled at periodically by our guide that we should be going this way or shouldn't be going that way.
3:45p - I hear Maren, who got sick of the caves and headed back to the boat, yelling for us. She's getting pinched again and our guide is saying, "The boat is leaving! The boat is leaving!" So we stop for ice cream, then climb back aboard the boat, only to be told to take our luggage and move three boats down. This boat is a very good friend of
Halong Bay
The Caves! It was like an amusement park in there...should've had a rollercoaster! our guide (who's pawning us off already) so we have nothing to worry about...great.
4p - We're on a new boat with our 3rd guide and I'm not even sure which one he is. We're asked if we'd like to head to Cat Ba Island now...as if we have a choice?
5:30p - Arrive at Cat Ba Island, where the four of us get thrown into a different bus than the rest of the boat, and drive PAST the Cat Ba National Park, check into our hotel (which is very nice for our standards!) and are told that dinner is at 7p and they know nothing about fishing or a guide.
6p - 6:20p - Wait in the hotel lobby to see if anyone wants to take us fishing.
6:20p - Give up and relax in our fancy hotel rooms (note: these rooms would be standard for an American Motel) until dinner at 7p.
7p - Eat a dinner almost identical to our lunch, which although it was good food, was not as satisfying the second time around. We did however have a man come sit with us and introduce himself as Ting, our guide.
Halong Bay
Cameron and I leaving the caves. Ting knew nothing about fishing either.
We spent the rest of the night enjoying the luxuries of a hotel with towels, flushing toilets, fresh soap on the sink, a proper bathtub/shower and...t.v.! We watched Blades of Glory.
Day 2:
7a - An absolutely delicious buffet breakfast!
8a - It turns out that Ting is not our guide after all and we are directed, I can't even tell you by who, to a bus to take us back to a boat and back to Halong Bay.
9a - We're cruising back towards Halong Bay with a new guide...number 5?...and new people on a new boat. These people turn out to be super nice and the weather was beautiful, so we were enjoying the day.
10a - Switch boats. In the middle of the freakin' bay.
11:45a - Arrive back in Halong Bay and wait in a random location for a random person who will find us and take us to a bus and into Halong City for lunch. He found us...
12p - Same lunch as the lunch and dinner on Day 1, except a bonus of potato soup. My first bit of
Halong Bay
We've had enough of the caves and are headed back to the boat. potato since home...it tasted soooooooo gooooood!
1p - On the bus and headed back to Hanoi.
5:30p - Arrive in Hanoi and are dropped off at the travel agency where we booked the trip to have some words with the English speaking travel agent who'd seemed so sweet. Her English wasn't so good anymore. "This old itinerary, they no give me new," she said.
So Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island were not quite what we'd expected, but I guess that's what you get when you're having too much fun in the city to plan ahead. Halong Bay is absolutely beautiful and we actually had so much fun despite our crazy situation. We left the travel agency and headed straight to the bus station for our 18-hour overnight sleeper bus to Hoi An, a little beach town in Central East Coast Vietnam.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.118s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0562s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
