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Hey all!
After our last (and longest) night in a night train we arrived this morning at 4:30 am in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, and took a private bus to Halong Bay. I am glad that we don't have another night train journey. This one took 13 hours (3:30 pm yesterday till 4:30 am today) and although our compartment was all right, the restrooms (or "happyroom" how they use to call it here - because you are happy to find one and happy after you have left it) were really disgusting. For whatever reason (eating too much, too hot weather, disgusting happyrooms...) I started to feel a little sick in the evening. So I way lying there, fearing that I had malaria or typhus or some other disease which would probably kill me tonight and telling myself constantly that this was most likely NOT the case. Which didn't make me fell any better. So I decided that the best thing would be to go to sleep and hope to wake up healty tomorrow. For that reason I went to bed at 6 pm and (although I woke up sometimes) slept most of the time till the arrival. Surprisingly without any sickness or diseases.
Well, I forgot to tell you about yesterday. Actually there is not too much to tell as we had to leave Hue at 2:30 pm. Melanie and I had breakfast at 8 am, we had planned to visit the citadell this morning. Unfortunatly it rained quite heavily, so we drank a lot of coffee and waited for the rain to stop. When it finally did, we went to the citadell, which was about 15 minutes walking distance from our hotel. But it was so hot and sticky that even walking very slowly was pretty hard. The citadell was closed, so we just went back to the hotel and tried to cool down in the lobby. At noon we went to the same fancy restaurant where we had had dinner the day before, had lunch (for me pancakes with icecream) and ordered some pizza to take away for the train. That was yesterday.
After arriving in Halong Bay today at about 8:30 am we had breakfast and got our rooms. Later we met for the boat trip through the Bay. We had a small boat (well, larger than a kajak and smaller than a ferry) for ourselves and took lunch while the boat was driving - pretty cool, although we had to stop eating a lot of times to take photos. The Bay is really comparable to Milford Sound (which is quite a compliment), see the photos I am going to post later :) After lunch we stopped for a (rather short) kajak trip and later we stopped again to visit a large limestone cave. The rest of the time we were on the deck and just enjoying the view.
Right now I am back at the hotel and soon, Melanie and I will go for some dinner in an italian restaurant. See you soon!
- comments
Pajc Hej, you! We're very glad to hear that you survived malaria and typhoid and whatever else!! No surprise you felt sick because of the "happyrooms". Some time ago, we read about them - pity that they're really as bad as reported, especially because the compartments look perfectly fine. Halong Bay looks absolutely stunning. We envy you... yet again. How long has your boat trip been? The entire day? This is the first time you mention rain. How much of it do you actually have? We understood that September was the pinnacle of the rainy period. We hope you had a delicious dinner and a good night! Hugs from all of us!
marieli Cool, your english reply sounds much better than my english entry ;-) The boadtrip took about four hours (including lunch, cajaking, caves). Late afternoon we were back and spend some time at the beach (unfortunatly rather dirty).Afterwards I went for dinner and some cocktails to an italian restaurant with Melanie. Yeah, we wew told by many locals that normally the rainy period would have already started but that we are lucky as it will probably begin later thid year.In the first days we sometimes had about one hour of hard rain in the evening but really sunny days. The day before yesterday it was raining all morning, than stopped for some hours and than started again really hard - you probably never saw anything like this before, Raffael you remember Acores? Like that, only for much longer.Now I am going to have some breakfast!