To escape our long, long stay in Hanoi, waiting endlessly for the visas for SK, and to cut our dangerous cycle of many trips to Highland Coffee and our new caffeine and cake lifestyle, we went on a trip to Halong Bay.

Something Sean has wanted to do ever since 'Tomorrow Never Dies' and ever believing he is in fact 007 in another life, we took a day trip on the boat, and decided to wing it ourselves for the night and stay over in the city.

The boat trip itself was lovely. We arrived in Halong after a long drive, and got onto a wooden boat, which had no heating and it was bloody freezing. Luckily we had some layers and huddled up. The lunch on the boat was delicious, as all our Vietnamese food has been, and because we were on the old fogeys trip, they were all too polite (and too full from their posh hotel buffet breakfasts) to eat too much, so we gobbled up more than our fair share. We were sharing our table with a couple from Kent, and the guy was an orchestra conductor, which was interesting, but more interesting to us than him it seems, and the conversation slowly died from there on.

The scenery was lovely, and we spent a couple of hours cruising around the rocks. The entire area is around 1500 square kilometers and is about 2000 separate islets, so we were never going to see them all, but just cruising around casually was still pretty impressive. Sean and I had arranged to do some kayaking (which we had completely forgotten about of course, so when the guide pointed us to the kayaks we were a little in shock, and not really feeling the cold, and possibly damp experience) but once we were in we had a whale of a time. We drifted around closer to the rock formations and went all around the islets, and out of sight of the tourist boats for a while, so that was really lovely.

We were also taken to a cave which was pretty horrendous. It was like Disneyland, or Alton Towers, and it felt really artificial and a bit like the queuing system for a rollercoaster. It was an amazing cave with a few separate chambers, but they had installed hundreds of neon lights inside, paved the floor and filled it with health and safety signs, and also put in some really artificial water features. It ruined it a bit for us, and we were a bit annoyed that this is what they had done with a UNESCO site, seeing as it's supposed to be preserving natural beauty...

And then it was back to the dock. Everyone else on the tour went home, and we were going to spend the night in Halong City, and thought we could explore a bit more on our own, as secretly we hate being part of the crowd. And escape the crowds we certainly did....

We completely misread the map (or the map was a bit s*** and wasn't very clear, take whichever story you like) and instead of being west of the city, as we thought, we were actually east. So we headed east (into the city we thought) but actually walked 2 km away, and then a very very long walk around a small town, convinced we were about to chance on the right street any moment. So we spent a good couple of hours wandering round we don't even know where, and wondering why we were getting such funny looks from the locals. When we eventually admitted defeat, and grabbed a taxi, we realised quite how far away we were, and how horribly wrong and mislead we had been.

So we eventually got to somewhere to stay, had a lovely Pho for dinner, and some cheeky spring rolls, and then went to bed, luckily we had a TV and Michael Jackson's 'This Is It' was on, could there be a more perfect ending to Halong Bay.

The following day was a little too cloudy to actually see much from the shore.... Which sort of completely spoiled our plan, but we had a nice walk along the front nonetheless. and it was really nice to get out of Hanoi, which we have almost exhausted. And back for another week in the city, waiting waiting, but also relaxing, before the real work starts.