Halong Bay
Halong Bay is this incredibly beautiful and massive bay east of Hanoi. Filled with rocky hills, caves and national parks as well as floating fishing villages and lots of tourists.
We were on an overnight tour so after a 3 hour drive ended up on a pretty cool old school wooden boat with about 20 others. Spent the day cruising around through the amazing misty scenery. Stopped by some big caves which would have been a bit cooler if they weren’t for the neon lights all through them, making it look like a dance party.
Unfortunately it was freezing cold so there was no swimming which would have been great but did get to go kayaking which was nice. Met loads of cool people on the boat and spent most of the day just playing cards and watching the rocks go by, very peaceful and relaxed….apart from the crazy dinner lady.
The crazy dinner lady served us our meals but was a bit pedantic about where we had to sit, moving people from different tables and yelling at you if you sat where you wanted, rather than where she wanted. Her lack of english made it difficult to explain that we just wanted to sit with there with our friend. Always interesting…..
Once the sun went down there wasn’t too much to do so we retired to our cabin after I was given the entire history and culture of Iceland by an over enthusiastic Icelandic guy.
The next day we headed back to port for an incredibly unorganized ride home where we all just ended up in random vans. The trip was beautiful but like all tours in this part of the world, no information about anything so its kind of like “surprise, we’re going over here now”
But had a good time meeting people and I like just being on boats, especially on super calm water like this. Would be an awesome place in the summer, jumping off the boat and things but there’s always next time!
So back to Hanoi where Judah and Brett had finally met up with us, we were only together for one night as me and Tash were leaving the boys to fly to Laos in the morning. We had a pretty relaxed evening at a bar and then eating huge ice cream sundays at “Fanny’s Ice-Cream.” Off to the airport bright and early for a short flight over the border to my final new country, number 24!
Tags: blogsherpa, halong-bay, hanoi, Travel, Vietnam
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