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Published: August 17th 2009
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After arriving back from Sapa at 5am, we headed to Hoan Kiem lake to observe the morning rituals of the Hanoians. This involved walking around the lake (in one direction only please!), extremely bizarre stretches and exercises, and various groups performing exercises as instructed by a loud speaker attached to a tree.
We eventually found somewhere open for breakfast, then headed back to the tour office to wait for our pickup to Halong Bay. The street was, as usual, full of street sellers with fruit, vegetables, meat and flowers for sale. A loud siren announced the approach of the police, and within seconds the entire street was clear of street sellers - some had picked up there wares and run, some had slid into a nearby house. The police car slowly made their way up the street and left, and the scene was restored to normal in the space of a few minutes. I guess it's how the police manage to supposedly enforce the law without actually impacting on normal life.
We were picked up by a van, and made our way towards Halong Bay. After about 1.5 hours, we stopped at a rest stop, and this is where
all the fun began. We had paid to have the deluxe tour, which involved a night on a deluxe boat with better food and better rooms, cruising around the bay and enjoying various activities such as Kayaking, swimming etc. At the rest stop our guide informed us that the boat we were meant to be going on was broken so two of us would have to stay on Cat Ba Island and two of us could stay on the boat. It took a while to establish that he was talking about the 'deluxe' boat so we would in fact be getting the standard boat anyway. We told him that this wasn't good enough and we wanted to travel together.
To cut a long story short, there had been a typhoon warning the previous day so the Government didn't allow any boats to go out, so all the people who were supposed to be going the day before were going today, so there wasn't enough room for us on the boat. After many heated discussions, with our tour guide and his boss on the phone, about the options available to us we ended up with two possible scenarios - go
on the cruise, including all the activities that we were supposed to be doing but just spending the night on the island instead of the boat, in a 3 star hotel 300 metres from the beach, or having a day trip and heading back to Hanoi where we would only get half our money back. We decided to go for the island option.
We boarded our boat, and were served a lunch of seafood. Since of course Jen doesn't eat seafood, she got to eat rice an tofu for lunch, despite being assured by the tour operator that there would be other options. The food itself was decidedly average so rice probably wasn't a bad option! After lunch we traveled to the (amazing/surprising?) cave. The cave itself was very beautiful, but was full of every other tourist in Halong Bay that day, and very hot so we were looking forward to the promised swimming and Kayaking. We cruised through the bay, marveling at the beautiful limestone islands, when after about half an hour we were told we were about to get off the boat at Cat Ba island, and because we were staying on the island we didn't have
time for Kayaking or swimming! We were dropped off on the island and loaded onto a bus (along with the other people on our boat who had been shunted onto the island due to lack of space) then told we had to wait for 5 minutes for another boat load of people, which turned into 15 minutes, which turned into an hour, while boat after boat unloaded people who got onto a bus and left straight away.
Eventually the bus set of for the half hour ride through the beautiful Cat Ba island, and dropped half our group at a nice looking hotel. We carried on round the corner to our hotel, the next lie from our tour guide - it was old, dirty, smelly, the water stopped working (while Simon was washing his hair so he stormed down to reception in a towel!), the Air conditioning wasn't working, and the beach was nowhere in sight!
We enjoyed a beer on the waterfront (which was more of a port not a beach) watching the sunset, had a fairly decent dinner put on by the hotel, and played some pool.
At 8am the next morning we were loaded into
a minibus again and headed back to where the boat was picking us up. We were told we would have a 2 hour cruise through the bay before heading back to land. After about 45 minutes the city was in sight, then after 1 hour we were back at the wharf where we sat for about half an hour while they filled up water tanks and got the boat ready for the next load of unsuspecting tourists. After a rather average lunch we headed back to Hanoi, where we were dropped off at the office of the tour operator to discuss our refund with the boss. Unsurprisingly, after an hour of rather heated discussion which included Simon threatening to camp out in their office overnight, and claiming to be a member of the tourist board in England (although he had no idea if there even was one), while the 'boss' (who apparently wasn't the boss anyway) completely ignored us most of the time, we eventually left with a measly $10 refund.
After a quick dinner we caught a taxi to the train station to head off on our next adventure to Hoi An.
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