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Published: March 10th 2007
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We arrived in Hanoi at 8-30pm. We had booked a hotel and they came to pick us up at the airport. After exchanging some money we got our first taste of Vietnamise driving. The kid that was driving us (he could have been no more than 17) would speed up to the back of every car flashing his lights until they moved over driving inches away from them, crazy! When we got to Hanoi old town it was even more crazy, there were thousands of scooters everywhere, all missing each other by the closest of margins. There were even people driving the wrong way up the street. We got to our hotel and were told that the $7 room we'd booked wasn't available but they had a $10 room instead. We just took it as it was getting late and we were hungry. We had some dinner then a beer at Bia Hoi Junction for only 2000 dong a glass which is about 12 1/2 cents or 7 pence!
We spent our first day walking around the Hoem Kien Lake where we got talking to a local then wandered through the insanely busy streets that sold everything. Shoes down one
street, clothes down another, nuts and blots down a third and so on, everything could be found in it's own section of the old town.
The following day we got talking to 2 local guys who invited us for green tea. We had tea and some doughnut-like balls. The conversation got around to Halong Bay. They asked us whether we had been. Then,coinsidently, one of them had a friend who sold tours. Luckily we had seen the going price of the tours so knew what they should cost. We couldn't really refuse to take a look so went round to the tour office. It actually looked a really good tour (although very similar to any offered in the town) and we told them the price that we had seen elsewhere. They knocked $1 off so we decided we might as well buy it here as anywhere else, so did. The next day we went to the Ho Chi Min Museluem to see Ho Chi Min's body. Unfortunately it was a Sunday and so wasn't open. Instead we walked around and saw the palace and took a photo of it before seeing a sign telling us not to take photos,
Junks, Halong Bay
The amazing view after coming out the cave oops!
The next day we set off on our Halong Bay tour. We drove from Hanoi to Halong City, which took around 2 hours, where we got onto our Junk, this is where we would be spending the first night of our 3 day/2 night tour. The weather wasn't brilliant as it was cloudly and the visibility wasn't great, it was,however, normal for the time of year. As we got closer to the Karst rock formations in Halong bay they started changing from the misty blobs that we could see from a distance to the way I've seen them in the travel brochures. We docked and visited Surprise cave, the most impressive cave in Halong Bay. It was very big and was lit up very atmospherically. The best part came, however, when we emerged out of the cave to get an amazing view looking out over where all the junks were moured. This is when we really got an appreciation of the beauty of Halong Bay. We got back on the boat and sailed to a place where we could do some kayaking. We had to balance along wooden beams to get to the kayaks. I'd taken my camera
in a plastic bag and just hoped that I wouldn't fall in. Once in the kayak with Matt we kayaked over to some floating houses. I passed Matt the camera to take a photo, as we were doing this the kayak rocked, pretty scary because if we'd tipped it over my camera would have be ruined. Whilst kayaking past one of the houses 3 big dogs came running and barking . We were quite close to them and thought they were going to jump off the floating platform and onto our kayak to attack us! We quickly paddled away and luckily they must have decided that they didn't want to get wet so didn't jump in to follow us! We had dinner on the boat, which consisted of spring rolls, a whole fish which sat looking at us, plus rice and vegatables. Since neither Matt or I really like fish that much we ended up still a bit hungry. We had a few drinks on the boat before going to our little cabin to sleep.
In the morning we sailed to Cat Ba Island, had breakfast on the boat before being taken to the hotel were we'd spend the
night. We met up with some of the people that had been on our boat the first day but had stayed in the hotel the first night, tonight they would stay on the boat. We all took a hike together. We got driven in a mini-van to the start of the walk where our guide set off. It took us up high through the trees to a point where we got over the hill in front of us to view all the mountains on the island. It was magnificent, nothing but lush green mountains in this direction, no signs of life, it gave a real feeling of the wild. We then climbed up to some spikey rocks and scaled these before heading back down a different route eventually coming out at a cafe where we had to wait for the transport back to the hotel for lunch. While in the cafe there was a cute little girl who had just got a new backpack and she proudly showed it off to all of us. Then her mum, the cafe owner, and her started to sing songs for us.
After lunch we had some free time. Some of the guys
hired bikes and went to hospital cave, but we'd seen a few caves recently so decided to head up to the monument above Cat Ba town then over the headland to the beaches, Cat Co 1, 2 and 3. There were plenty of Vietnamise tourists at Cat Co 1 and some of them were even in the sea, it wasn't warm enough! That night we went out for a few drinks and ended up smuggling some cans of beer into a club so we didn't have to pay their inflated prices. It wasn't that busy though so after we finished the drinks we left.
We got back on the boat the next morning and sailed back to Halong City where we had lunch (fish again!) then drove back to Hanoi. We had one more day in Hanoi before getting the 14 hour overnight bus to Hue.
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pretty t-shirt Matt