They don't seem to celebrate Christmas much, but there are some places with lights and decorations, but I think it's mostly for the foreigners. We got up at 7:30 for breakfast and then went to the Sung Sot cave, "Amazing" cave in English, saw a monkey at the end eating some bread, and then went to take showers. The cave was really touristy and it made me miss Sewanee with the untouched caves and preserved nature. We had woken up early to have time to go swimming, but it was too cold, so we just took showered and got packed. We had a terrible lunch at a nearby hotel and then went on the bus back to Ha Noi. Ronald and I had a few hours to kill before our night train, so we ate, went ... read more

This day was sort of a worthless day...we walked around a bit and went to the lake, paid to get into the famous temple and saw models/brides posing for pictures along the sides of the lake. We went to the train station, booked our tickets, and had lunch at a cafeteria style place which reminded me of The Cheesecake Factory because it had a ton of different options to choose from. While we were walking around the other day we found the Kangaroo Cafe, littered with propaganda of how it is the one and only legitimate Kangaroo Cafe. We went inside when it was closing and had a look at their tours. for Halong bay for two days and one night was $79 each and for Sa Pa it was $129 each. We booked these tours, ... read more

When we went out for breakfast (we paid in baht for this) we saw our tuk tuk driver from a week ago who had waited for us while we saw the famous building (can't remember the name...), so we asked him to meet us as Saysolay at 12 so we could go to the airport. We packed and waited outside, played checkers, and when he drove up he parked across the street. We went over to start loading our things and then some French lady came and was saying something to the effect of this was her tuk tuk driver and why are we in her tuk tuk. I assume that's what she said, but I don't speak French, so I can't be sure. Either way, we got the point across that we were going to ... read more

This morning we woke up and were at the Wonderful Tours office at 8:40 as planned. We were told we'd leave at 9:00, so we went to the cafe across the street to get breakfast. Unfortunately, when 9 rolled around, they hadn't even started making our sandwiches yet. So off with no breakfast. On our tour was: a Hungarian couple, an Australian couple, a Korean girl, a Swedish man, and an Australian guy. Our tuk tuk truck took us up to the Elephant Cave Temple first. This was basically a tiny cave with a few buddhas inside and one rock that sorta looked like an elephant. Sort of a waste of time if you ask me, but then we were back in the tuk tuk to go to the water cave. There was a restaurant oh-so-conveniently ... read more

Today we switched to a room upstairs because a) it’s the same price and b) it’s bigger and has a balcony! We set out on a mission to find a tour for tomorrow or Sunday because today we decided not to tube as Ronald has to work in the evening and that would be totally lame if we went tubing but didn’t drink…so, we walked around asking for prices and found Wonderful Tours who we settled with. We wanted to do the multi-tour with kayaking, caving, trekking, and tubing, and most of the places offered it for 90,000 (except for Green Discovery which was like more than 200,000 kip because “they are a company with certificates”…that was my answer when I asked why theirs was so much more expensive) but seemed sorta risky, so when we ... read more