Day 352 - King of the Junks

---

An 8am start ahead of the 3+ hour journey to get to Halong Bay. The tour company we went with, Handspan, favour the approach that we like of having everyone meet at their office. The alternative, which is to offer hotel pickups and which might sound better, invariably means sitting in a minibus for an hour picking up everyone else before driving past your own hotel once you finally get going towards the real destination.

Halong Bay is famous for thousands of limestone islands and scenery reminiscent of ‘The Beach’. We arrived at the dock from which all the tourist boats depart and were absolutely gobsmacked at the number of similar-looking junks and just the number of people around. Hopes for a relaxing couple of days away from it all more or less evaporated. Once on board we realised what paying twice as much as most other trips means - and we were impressed. Our junk was the same size as the others but had 12 people rather than 20+ on the others, and it was really, really comfortable. Lunch was a feast of very fresh seafood and was presented in the way a fancy (onshore) restaurant would do it. We cruised for a bit and chatted with the others over a few drinks in the sunshine before stopping to look around the most amazing and gargantuan caves. Our guide was pretty unnecessary really and spent his time pointing out tenuous animal-looking shapes in the rock formations.

Back on the boat we were soon in the water swimming in the warm waters. For some reason it doesn’t seem like the sea before you jump in, probably because there are no waves and there is land in all directions, so the saltwater comes as a bit of a shock. Dinner was similar to lunch, and was washed down with revolting Vietnamese wine that we thought we’d better try since we’re here, and the evening was great fun swapping stories with our fellow passengers. When we went to bed we were entertained by a couple in the next door bedroom having a very loud argument which culminated in them splitting up.

---