This morning, I got up early and left the house in search of a taxi that would take me into town in time to get the bus to Halong Bay. I joined a tour for three days that takes you from Hanoi to Halong, and I have to admit, it was nice to have everything organised by someone else for a change!

I was the last one on the bus and was greeted by like 15 grinning Vietnamese faces. Slight panic that I would have no one to talk to for three days, I scanned the whole bus and found a few "westerners" way in the back. A bit relieved, I sat in one of those fold out chairs pretty much in the middle of a Vietnamese family, complete with 2 little girls who were jumping around and screaming... The ride felt like more than 3 hours... When one of the girls wasn't behaving, her father would roll up a newspaper and give her a whack. She would look stunned for a second, stop what she was doing and stand there... and then go right back to climbing all over the seats and screaming.

We got to the docks in Haiphong, where there were a million other junks waiting for their passengers... We climbed through the crowds and got onto our junk. It was quite nice, the cabins were small but clean and there was a big rooftop deck with deck chairs and stuff. We set off into the bay, they fed us lunch with lots of seafood and after they cleared everything away, one of the little girls proceeded to fall asleep on the table.

That afternoon we visited some caves, which were horribly lit up in multicolored lights to give some kind of arsty atmosphere or something, we chugged past floating villages and had old women on little rowboats try to sell us fruit, and one actually came on board to show us pearls. She tried to sell earrings to one of the Australian girls I was talking to, who pulled back her hair and showed the woman pretty much exactly the same earrings, so the woman was like "Oh Ok, well for your mother then!" They are very aggressive when they try to sell you things here.

Just when I was starting to feel a bit seasick, we were told we could jump off the boat and go swimming! The water was really warm and still, and me and the Aussies floated there for about 45 mins just chatting. It was so beautiful bobbing there in the water surrounded with these huge karsts and the sun setting...

That night we all planned to sleep on the top deck because those rooms were so bloody hot and stuffy! The "standard" option didn't involve air conditioning. But it started chucking it down so that failed. Stuffy night in the cabin it was!