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Published: December 20th 2007
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After our traumatic journey to get here we just wanted to sleep, so we stepped off the bus into a touts arms. We didn't care where we went, luckily the guesthouse turned out to be ok, cleanish with very friendly staff and of course cheap!!
We snuggled into our sleeping sheets and slept like babies for hours. When we awoke we explored the city to find our guesthouse was down a market street, great to see how the locals live, selling their frogs, eels, fish, e.t.c. but not great to get to and from our guesthouse. Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam and blends french colonial and vintage with it's labyrinth of streets and stalls. Not far into our explorations with my nose in the lonely planet map, Jason got jumped on by a local vietnamese fruit seller and we ended up having photos taken with her hat and scales for a price of course and she threw in some manky pineapple for us too.
On our wanderings around the old quater we visited Hoan Kiem lake and tortoise island which has a giant embalmed tortoise of the species said to still inhabit the lake. Unfortunately we couldn't find
any! The lake is known as Hoan Kiem lake (the lake of the returning sword) because legend has it in the 15th century heaven gave an emperor a magical sword that he used to drive the chinese out of vietnam. One day after the war while out boating he came across a giant tortoise swimming on the surface of the water, the creature grabbed the sword and dissapeared into the lake. The tortoise then returned the sword to its grateful owners.
A trip to Vietnam wouldn't be complete without visiting magnificent Halong Bay. Our 3 hour minibus journey took us to Halong harbour, where we were greeted by the sight of thousands of identical looking ships with thousands of tourists waiting to board. We were directed to our ship and we jumped on board. We had lunch at the harbour which yep you guessed it consisted once again of rice and seafood. We set off on our voyage with all the other boats to a limestone cave which was pretty impressive but very touristy and our guide showed us round pointing out dragons heads and private human parts in the rocks with his laser torch, which we all found
quite amusing.
Once we made it out of the cave harbour after bashing all the other ships around us out of the way, as all the boats appeared to have the same itinery. We visited a floating fish farm where we mistook salmon for sharks until the farmer corrected us. We then anchored for the amazing sunset and a night gazing at the stars. An evening teaching some aussie lads how to play rummey (our new found game) lead to our cabin which seemed nice with its en-suite bathroom - Luxury!! Until I asked Jason "Whats that noise?" expecting an exagerated answer as normal I replied "yeah right" when he said "RATS!" When I questioned him further he continued it's rats! Now there wasn't just one gnawing noise there were 3 or 4 coming from different areas of the cabin. Great!! Luckily I was so tired I slept all night and I didn't get to meet any of the unwanted guests unlike some of the other passengers.
Our second day was a big question mark? as our guide spoke very little english only able to tell us "you will get off the boat at 10" or "you will
get on the boat at 12". So we docked at Cat Ba island and set off on a minibus. When we stopped at the bottom of the mountain our guide said "2 hours up, 1 hour down" Hmmm that can't be right! So with our flip flops and small heavy back packs we set off thinking how difficult can it be!! After nearly dying walking up a million steps the path got narrower and steeper and we were finding it really difficult to keep up with the guide who raced ahead in the sizzling sun. The trek turned into a mountain climb, No joke! but we still managed to scale to the summit which consisted of a rock and a rusty viewing tower. The tower could only hold 5 people at a time and Jason was the 14th person up there in a row and apparently the view was pretty good but I was quite satisfied with the view I had as vertigo was setting into my exhausted body. While we recovered it seemed like all the tourists in Halong Bay had joined us which made the small rock pretty scary. The thought of the decent made me wish there
was a helicopter to fly me down but no could do!! We had to climb back down which thankfully did prove to be slightly easier until Jason needed a toilet break, so we hung back from the group and when we tried to catch them back up we came to a junction, we randomely turned left and continued only for the path to get steeper and steeper, great we were lost in the jungle! So we decided to turn back and head the other way hoping we'd made the right decision. By the time we made it down to the bottom we could hear our aussie pals saying "where's the welshies?" to the tour guide who didn't understand and was pushing them towards the bus, he hadn't even noticed we were missing.
An action packed day continued with Kayaking into the sunset exploring floating villages, fish farms and grotto's, then onto monkey island. These ferrel monkeys pretended to ignore us when we stepped foot onto their island so when Jason edged forward for a closer look one started running towards us sending us into the sea to escape. We later saw the sign 'MONKEY'S BITE, CAN CARRY RABIES, DO
NOT FEED, KEEP AWAY!' we'd learnt our lesson.
Our second night did not have a rat infected cabin but a grounded hotel room full of hornets and on the 6th floor, not good for my legs after our busy day as there was no lift but had a beautiful view overlooking Cat Ba harbour. Jason took great pleasure in killing all the hornets!
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