Worth a quick mention is the street we went to to buy our ticket for Halong Bay. The company we used was called Sinh Tourist. So we took a walk to the street where we thought their office was. Before we even got there we walked past three different places also called Sinh Tourist. Hmmm. We got to the street we needed to be on to find that EVERY place was called Sinh Tourist! There must have been about twelve different places all next door to one another. We'd used them elsewhere in Vietnam and they have a good reputation, hence other companies using the name. We'd seen similar copying like this before especially in India but this was ridiculous! Luckily we had a photo from their website showing the legitimate office so we knew what it looked like. Each place even had the same building number outside, crazy! 

The journey was a long four hours from Hanoi and we stopped off at a "government approved" handicraft place drink stop. The items they had in here were very nice but very over priced as you'd expect. They had a large area with about twenty women all sewing super fast. They had small pictures of what they were sewing on a larger scale. They were fascinating to watch and the detail was amazing!

In Halong Bay ideally you're supposed to spend two or three days out there sleeping on a boat and exploring the limestone caves but we had limited time and funds left so we had to settle for a day trip. It was okay but very commercial with lots of other boats doing the same thing. Sadly the big beautiful boats with sails that you see advertised (junk boats – they are Chinese sailing ships) are not allowed any more as well as the fact that all boats are now required to be painted white. Some stupid new policy. So as I imagine it's difficult to afford to paint your boat all the time, most of the boats looked very grotty with peeling paint etc. Not very pretty. 

We did get to go kayaking out on the sea which was fun and the limestone cliffs jutting out of the water were very impressive but the tranquillity of it was spoilt by the number of people. Huge tourist trap which we were fully expecting. We also did a quick stop at a cave which they had lit up inside with multi colour lights, yuck. After seeing Paradise cave no cave will compare! 

Overall we were much more impressed with the limestone cliffs in Tam Coc. Perhaps we would have enjoyed it more if we'd stayed on a boat for a couple of nights. If you had lots of money you could get a luxury boat! Maybe another time, hey!