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Published: January 14th 2015
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This morning we were up and at breakfast by 7.15am. A great spread of eggs, toast, fruit, crepes, Oreo biscuits, sausage, ham, juices, tea and coffee. Dani made herself a delicious crepe with condensed milk and crushed up Oreos all over it. Yum!
By 8.15am we were out waiting for our tiny little boat to take us back to Cat Ba Island. It was rainy and cold. The boat ride back to the island was not very comfortable at all. We were all getting wet form the rain blowing in. We kind of huddled as much as we could. On our way back to the island we stopped at a local fishing village and picked up a still live fish. It was hit over the head, put in a plastic bag and thrown onto the front of the boat.
Back on Cat Ba Island, we jumped straight on the shuttle bus that drove us back over to the other side of the island where our Junk was waiting for us. It was nice to hop back into a dry boat. We had another couple of hours on the Junk and were treated to a delicious lunch of fresh
fish, (was black catfish and absolutely beautiful) egg, fried corn, a spicy kind of sweet and sour chicken and Susu with carrot.
Once back at the harbor we said goodbye to our guide Ken and all the people we did the tour with. We were ushered onto a shuttle bus and the longish drive back to Hanoi began. There is a lot to see along the way but we all dozed on and off along the way.
At 4.30pm we were dropped off at our hotel in Hanoi (we stayed at Icon 36 Hotel in the Old Quarter) we settled in and sorted all our gear out. We had washing done back on Monkey Island but unfortunately they didn’t have it dry in time so we hung all our washing on clothes hangers and hung them around the room to dry.
We headed out for dinner at about 7.30pm and went to a recommended restaurant out of the Lonely Planet book. It was called Highway 4 and boasted a menu of everything from crickets to ostrich to frogs. Bull’s penis anyone?
We ordered an assortment of different dishes. Fried crickets with lemon leaf, pork ribs, Ash-roasted
sweet potato, Hanger pork steak, fresh spring rolls with prawns, beef steak cubes and of course, rice. The crickets were actually really delicious. They took on the flavors’ that they were cooked with really well. The rest of the food was absolutely delicious as well!
We were finished dinner by about 9.30pm and headed back to Icon 36 for the night. We booked 2 rooms here and it was $150 for the 2 nights. Pretty good value for 2 rooms, 2 nights. The hotel is nothing fancy but is comfortable and has everything we needed and it’s located in the Old Quarter. The wifi was really quite good here, which was a bonus.
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