We woke up on the junk, and were fed a breakfast consisting of untoasted white toast and very sweet coffee. Then the boat started again and basically crashed into a whole load of other junks at a jetty, and we got off the boat on to Cat Ba Island.

A bus appeared and took us to Cat Ba national park, where we were given the choice of either biking or trekking. I chose biking, and spent the next hour fiddling with the gears because they didn't work, obviously. And yes, it was rather hilly. So I sweated profusely (just for your information).

We also went to another island called Monkey island, didn't see any monkeys though, and spent a good hour kayaking around the general area.. my arms hurt now.

That night we stayed in a hotel on Cat Ba, with what seemed like half the population of Vietnam, concentrated into our restaurant. They were pouring out of the lift and took up the entire place, and made so much noise with the yelling and the dropping of chopsticks and the laughing and the noisy eating, jeeeez! With two Americans, we went to a pub called the Green Mango and had a few beers and tried to chat with the locals haha.. not too successful! It was good fun though.

We left Cat Ba this morning and took the boat back to the docks, in which time I managed to get sunburnt while sitting out on the deck at about 10am while it was cloudy. Grrrrr... The boat was moving SO slowly it took like 2 hours to get back (I had moved inside by this time) but we were probably not going faster than a walk, or a light jog at the most. It was incredibly frustrating! But we made it in the end, had lunch on the "beach" which means lunch on the pavement under a plastic roof near the beach, and then bussed it all the way back to Hanoi.

The girls slept all the way :)