Halong Bay... Paradise??

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Hello everyone!

After exploring Hanoi I can't even begin to tell you how much I was looking forward to a weekend in Halong Bay! Before we even arrived I was talking about staying longer...although a typhoon was due to hit the bay on the Tuesday, so we were strongly advised not to do that lol.

On Saturday morning a bus picked us up from our hotel and we traveled to Halong, which was a four hour drive.... as usual I fell asleep (I think so far I have managed to stay awake on about three bus journeys!). When we arrived in Halong we climbed on board a small boat that took us to the junk where we would be staying the night. I had read some real horror stories about these junks on tripadvisor so we were expecting the worst, but our junk was reasonably nice. We had our own bathroom... something that should never be under valued... so we were happy lol.

After lunch on the boat we went to Cathedral Island. Up until this point my initial reaction of Halong Bay had been serious disappointment. The bay was very very crowded, the water was dirty, you had floating rubbish passing you by, and you could hardly see the island because a thick fog had set in..... not the picture from the brochure! However when we got to Cathedral Island we climbed to the top for the stunning view... and the picture from the brochure was suddenly visible. The fog lifted as the day went on and the sun burned through 😊 We went swimming on Cathedral Island beach, and after visiting a limestone cave, we kayaked around a lagoon and got to see some monkeys!

That night Dad went to bed, while I joined three American girls that we had met on the junk to entertain the bay with our gorgeous voices on the Karaoke machine. The crew didn't need much encouraging, practically grabbing the microphone off us for them to sing 'their song'... all in all it was a great night, and I am pretty sure the rest of the bay appreciated us serenading them :P

In the morning we disembarked the boat at Cat Ba Island and went for a trek in the national park there. This trek was very interesting... the guide told us at the start of the trek that we had to do some rock climbing... I didn't realise how serious he had been! The view from the top of the peak was worth it though.

After the park we drove to Cat Ba city, where the rest of the group checked in to a hotel... Dad and I had booked to stay in a bungalow on Monkey Island so we had to wait a few hours for another boat to take us. Unfortunately that didn't actually leave us with much time on Monkey Island which was disappointing.... we asked whether we could stay an extra night on Monkey Island but everything in Halong Bay seems to be geared towards staying one night on a boat, and one night on the island... not much room for movement unless you are willing to pay a fortune, which we weren't, especially with a looming typhoon!

Monkey Island was the paradise I had been looking for... it is a fairly small resort so not too many people crowding the island which was nice. The resort provides free kayaks, so we decided to kayak around the island looking for the famous cave (which we never found) and looking for monkeys... which we did find 😊 We saw a dustbin size jellyfish too!! It was huge! Made me think twice about going for a swim! After seeing one huge jellyfish Dad and I were a little on edge and as we kayaked around the island we both thought we saw another one so carefully paddled past it... it turned out on closer inspection to be a hat!! But hey better to be safe than sorry lol!

The next morning we got up early to catch our boat back to Cat Ba Island to meet the rest of the group and then make our way back to Halong Harbour for the bus ride back to Hanoi. We met some fantastic people on this trip! I think that's probably the part about travelling that I am enjoying the most, at every point and experience we have met new interesting amazing people, and because of the things you are experiencing together you can't help but become friends!

To sum up our time in Halong Bay, it was amazing, I am so glad we went... but the tour was very rigid, we had a minute by minute schedule of where we had to be and how long we had in each place... which meant it wasn't very relaxing. However we are so lucky to have gone, we got told by other friends we met, that Halong Bay closed a few days later due to bad weather.

After a final day in Hanoi... we now had to face the dreaded sleeper bus!!!! AHHHH!!

xxx

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