23 -25 February

We had an early wake up call for our trip out to Halong Bay. At 7.30am we boarded the bus and headed to Halong City where we were due to get our boat.

Our boat was wooden with three floors. The first floor consisted of half a dozen bedrooms complete with ensuite, the second floor was a restaurant and the third was the viewing deck, where we spent most of our time. The boat was fairly small enough to fit 15 tourists on board.

We had one full day at sea with one nights stay on a boat and then one full day on an island in the bay called Cat Ba. All that for 57 dollars and included all our activites and our food.

On our boat we had a good bunch of people, a few idiots, but we are starting to get used to the fact that not everyone who travels is as nice as you would hope. You get a lot of very narrow minded, naive people.

We spent our first day on the boat kayaking in the bay and we went to visit a cave. I tried to go swimming, but I slipped on deck and fell down a set of stairs, bruising my ribs and completely blackening one of my bottom cheeks. I am always doing silly things like that.

That night we had a late one, admiring the beautiful scenery under the stars and singing karaoke yet again with the crew until the early hours. We wanted to spend every second awake there, it was so glorious and relaxing. Mist covered mountains and hills keeping the boat safe from the open sea at night. It looked like a land long lost, I could have been in Jurrassic Park!

The nest day we were due to go on a walk round Cat Ba National Park up a big mountain, but I could barely walk and was in a lot of pain. We waited at the bottom, which I was a bit upset about.

The hotel we were booked into on the island was lovely, we did have free time in the afternoon to explore the island, but Adam and I decided to catch up on some much needed sleep. We were so knackered we slept in until dinner and then went for a couple of drinks with some of the people off the boat.

We left the following day and then caught a 14 hour bus to Hue. I really wasn't looking forward to it with my bad back and Adam's bad back had also started to play up again (I think he was just trying to steal all the attention as usual... joking! ). It was a pretty bad bus ride, I spent the first half of it weeping into my Ipod.