Advertisement
Published: October 20th 2010
Arriving in Hanoi, the capital, it became immediately apparent that this is the noisiest city on South East Asia.
We spent the entire morning looking for the Mongolian embassy to get our visas for the country. When we eventually found it they were closed for lunch. An embassy closed for lunch can be anything up to 3 days or as little, but never less than, two and a half hours. Fortunately Mongolia opt for the 2.5 hour lunch and so we were able to put our applications in with our passports with a promise to pick it all up in three days time. The embassy doesn't get too many visitors.
In the days between we decided to go to Halong Bay, the highlight of Vietnam. I first heard of Halong Bay, like many, from the Top Gear program. They portrayed it in a much better light that they did Alabama.
Halong Bay is a few hours from Hanoi and is a collection of thousands of islands of limestone in the emerald waters of the South China Sea.
Our first day was beautiful and sunny and the boat we were on drifted through the various islands and to caverns and caves carved into the rocks. There are even some villages floating in the sea, one even has a school.
After some kayaking around a few of the islands we had a few drinks with the other people on the boat.
When we moored up for the night we all dived off the top level into the water, I managed to land on my face and get a black eye in the process, though this was a minor injury compared to an American who managed to burst his ear drum.
We woke up around 4am, partly due to the raging storm that was shaking the boat, and partly due to the fact that there was a leak in the ceiling of our room. As water continued to pour down in a place that made me look like a nervous death row prisoner.
I decided to give up hope of more sleep and tried to convince Rhian to curl up close to me so she'd get wet instead!
The morning was misty and actually gave the place a more mystical feel than before. It was a shame we could only stay the one night there, but that one night was pretty damn good!
We headed back to Hanoi, met up with the Mongolians who'd diligently worked on our visa application, something that I'm sure takes all of five minutes, and we headed for the mountains.
Unfortunately, any hope of hiking was dampened when we arrived in thick fog, we couldn't see across the road. We waited for two nights before throwing in the towel and headed back to Hanoi for our last night in South East Asia.
We had a Thai meal as it's by far the best food in the region and celebrated leaving for China in the morning.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.182s; Tpl: 0.031s; cc: 11; qc: 47; dbt: 0.0468s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Keralatour.us
non-member comment
kerala tours
nice pics and postings...I am very interesting to know about new trvel experiences and new trvel destinations in the world. So I am always keep my eyes open towards new trends in travel field and good blog posts helping me to know new generation travellers mentality. This is very Nice and Informative posting and helped me to improve my knowledge position about tourism in these places specified in this post.. Kerala tours