ChinaTeacher

Well, the pace of my holiday has picked up now that I have joined my travel group from Intrepid.  There are 12 of us in all, most from various parts of Australia, one from Ireland, a Swiss, two from England, my colleague from Japan, and yours truly.  We all took a ‘cyclo’ tour of Hanoi on the first day (it’s a bicycle rickshaw – they don’t use rickshaws any more which is too bad).  Then, after lunch we started our 4 hour mini-bus ride down to Halong Bay.  The trip was quite eventful – we travelled through glorious countryside where we saw that it is rice-planting time – lots of farmers in the paddies – great photos, too! 
   

Today we set out quite early on our very own boat for Halong Bay.  It was quite hazy when we started, but thankfully the sky cleared up for us.  The views were absolutely spectacular!  We spent the day at leisure, as you will see from my photos.  A superbly fresh seafood luncheon was prepared on board for us as well.  I tried Octopus, Shrimps and Squid which the staff had purchased from the boat vendors waiting for us at the dock – Outstanding! 
   

 Words cannot adequately describe how wonderful it felt to be boating around Halong Bay – I strongly recommend it.  We are staying overnight on Cat Ba Island, but I would advise you to try to stay overnight IN Halong Bay, right on the water.  One bit of excitement was the hairy motorcycle ride up the hill to our hotel, and then a quick trek through Cat Ba National Park to see a Cave Military Hospital which was built in 1958 by the Vietnamese and the Chinese. 

It was incredible to see – imagine an immense cave, and a concrete building featuring approximately 20 different rooms being built inside.  It is considered ‘bomb-proof’ because of the limestone surrounding it, and once featured its own movie theatre, swimming pool and table tennis room, in addition to hospital wards and operating rooms.  Amazing and quite sad to imagine what the conditions were when it was actually being used by hundreds of people in cramped conditions.

Tomorrow is another whirlwind adventure.  We start early by taking a boat ride out into Halong Bay where we will do some kayaking,  Upon our return, we immediately change and check out of our hotels to take a hydrofoil back to the mainland where we will meet our bus and head back to Hanoi for a 5pm arrival time.  Group dinner will follow, then we repack our backs, take a quick shower, pick up some snacks and head to the train station for our overnight train ride up to SAPA.  Who knows what will happen next?!  Stay tuned!!!

 

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 7:24 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.