The Cave of Wonders. Yo, rugman! Haven't seen you in a few millenia. Gimmee some tassel!

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This is a sad moment (22:15 GMT+7, Thursday 15th September 2011). That is because this may be the last blog post that I (Elana) ever write.

But, never fear, because it may not. I may decide to write one about our LONG journey home to the good old U of K (that doesn't really work, but never mind. You catch my drift...). And then I may even decide to start my own blog about... stuff. My life. Things. Life, the Universe, and Everything. That sort of thing.

But, then again, I may not.

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Emotional (well, not that emotional; I was once told by a computer that I am emotionally cold, so that is the best stab at sentimentality I could muster) possible farewells to the world of blogging aside, I have a blog to write about Halong Bay!

We had to get up at a totally ridiculously insanely early time (I set my alarm for 6:45am) because our tour was starting early, since it is a 4 hour drive from Hanoi to the bay. When Mike finally got up, at about 7:05am, he announced that we wouldn't have time for breakfast. Great. But I knew better (as usual; I'm kind of a know-it-all :P) and we went down to the 2nd floor for breakfast, only to be told by the maitre d' that it would cost us $17++ per person. I had no idea what ++ (she said it "plus plus") meant, so I asked, and she said it was service and tax. So, yet again, despite the fact that breakfast was a buffet, we were falling prey to the crazy Vietnamese custom of taxing the service. Fabulous. Plus plus (see what I did there? Lord, I'm tired...) that was one expensive breakfast! But we had no choice, because we needed to eat, and this was the only way that was going to happen.

Luckily, the breakfast was actually quite good. I had fruit and pastries (including the best croissant of the holiday, but given the poor state of the others I'd had, this was not a huge achievement), and since we had paid so much, I went for a fried egg and hash brown as well. I was feeling too quesy for baked beans.

When we got downstairs at 7:35, our guide was already waiting for us. I suspected that he was our guide from his polo shirt, but we weren't sure, so I did some very surreptitious surveillance, during which he came over to me (dang!; I need to work on my espionage) and asked me if we were Michael.

As it happened, we were the only two on the tour. We sat with our guide for a bit whilst we waited for the driver, who kept telling our guide he was coming, but kept not actually coming. But finally he did at last arrive, and we got into our "bus": a car. We started on our super long drive, and our guide was telling us lots of interesting stuff about Hanoi and Vietnam and the traffic police and small pineapples and double-decker bridges. And stuff. (I realise this sounds a little like it wasn't actually interesting, but it was). I fell asleep (again, he was interesting, but I was very tired).

We stopped for coffee and a toilet-stop at a place that enthusiastically told us it was a workshop for disabled people. I was relieved to note that it wasn't actually a workshop whose function was to disable people, or to make disabled people, but rather a workshop for disabled people to make stuff to flog. It was an interesting pit-stop, because they were selling lots of weird stuff, the highlight being a vat of snake wine. It had a dead snake skeleton in it, and is supposedly useful for Rheumatism, Lumbago, and Sweat Limbs (no idea what that is...). Our guide said that he had tried snake wine many times and that it is totally gross. I think they put snake bile in it, so that isn't altogether surprising.

We left the pit-stop and drove to Halong Bay through a coal-mining town. When we arrived though, it was raining, but only a little. Mike bought a poncho. I already had mine.

We boarded a big boat, just the two of us, and our guide. And we headed off towards the bay. It began to rain quite a lot, so we put on our ponchos and went up to the open deck to see what we could see (to see what we could see...). When our guide joined us, we were perturbed to hear that we wouldn't be seeing the floating bar that Top Gear went to, because that wasn't in Halong Bay after all, but in Nha trang. Our guide knew all about Jeremy Clarkson, though. He also told us that they did all of the Halong Bay filming in a tiny little area of the enormous 1500 square km bay. Tut tut, Top Gear. Way to misrepresent your exploits!

We got to the foot of one of the huge monolithic limestone rocks, and disembarked the boat. At this point it wasn't raining, so we left our ponchos inside. Our guide showed us a grotto (the grotto of the wooden stakes), and it was really beautiful. There were all sorts of rock formations, and they were lit with multi-coloured lights. Our guide pointed out lots of interesting shapes, including an ENORMOUS breast (seriously, this thing would've been a gazillion ZZZZZ) with a huge nipple, that was supposed to represent fertility, or something, in the absence of a giant linga formation. Our guide also said that this grotto had been the storage space for thousands of wooden stakes that the Vietnamese had craftily used to defeat the Mongolians by drowning them. I was a little confused as to the method, but it was clearly effective.

While we were in the grotto, it started to rain hugely. Since the grotto was by no means watertight, there were waterfalls that started to form in the cave, which was pretty, but meant that we got really wet since we had to go under lots of them. Our guide was hilarious; he was running ahead of us in a really camp fashion, flapping his arms about. Genius! When we got out of the grotto, past the grotto of the heavens, the heavens had well and truly opened, and we were soaked, and our guide thought it was hugely funny and took a picture of us together in the rain. He then did lots of his funny running down the paths, and we followed more tentatively; it was slippery and I was in flip-flops. By the time we got back to the boat, we were so soaked that we could've been swimming. When Mike made a joke about this, our guide said we could go swimming in the bay. He was really keen for us to do this, but we didn't have swimming stuff. I did have spare underwear as it happened (I can't remember why I packed this, but it was great foresight) , but when we got back on the boat, they served us lunch and we started to dry off. Lunch wasn't too bad; Mike had talapia, and I had tofu and omelette and morning glory and pineapple. But after lunch a wave of nausea engulfed me, and I spent the rest of the time on board lying down, and I fell asleep at one point. So our plan to have a dip in the bay was foiled!

Back on dry land, having seen many more of the limestone islands jutting from the sea, we got back in the car for a non-stop trip back to our hotel. This was scary. The buses in Vietnam are allowed to go faster on the highways than normal cars, which meant that we were being overtaken by tonnes of buses, and also that at many points in the journey, buses travelling towards us were hurtling in our directions at speed in our lane, since in Vietnam the rule is that size is mighty. So bigger vehicles have impunity to pull out in front of anyone they see fit, and everyone else has to just avoid them. So we were forced into the hard shoulder more than once to avoid being walloped by the oncoming buses. I felt sorry for the people on bicycles, lowest on the pecking order, who were mostly children coming home from school and trying to get onto teeming roads without even a helmet for protection, going at super low speeds (especially those with more than one child on, which were numerous)!

I was glad when we made it safely back to our hotel. We thanked our guide (he had been a real laugh) and then we got ready to go out. Mike picked a restaurant that didn't seem to actually exist; we got to the right address, and it was nowhere to be found! Ironically, the guidebooks shpiel about this restaurant said that it was worth a visit to see where Hanoi was heading; and all the while this restaurant was heading for closure! Or, I suppose it could just have moved, since the restaurant of the night before had moved across town to a new site. But that would be less ironic. So I choose not to believe it.

Instead, we went to a schizophrenic tapas restaurant, the menu of which was half in Spanish, as anticipated, and half in French. But the food wasn't bad; I had duck again, and Mike had assorted tapas when he realised that it wasn't feasible to eat an entire paella on his own (the waitress asked him, "are you very hungry?" and gestured to the enormous pan next to us when he asked how big it would be). My mojito was too minty though.

Back to the hotel. I fell asleep quickly. I think Mike stayed up watching TV, and I assume therefore that he fell asleep in his clothes, but this is unconfirmed. But likely, all the same.

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