We were up and about early to jump on the bus to Halong Bay. This is when we first met our guide, Snake. He was a pretty funny bloke and gave a few reasons why he was called snake. He was born in the year of the snake and apparently he is also quite sneaky. He kept us entertained during the hour trip to the bay with various facts and figures about the history and Vietnam as a whole. We got to the bay and boarded a smaller boat to take us out onto our main ship. It was a fairly nice boat, the 'Halong Bay Party Cruiser' as she was called, pretty big and had 2 decks with rooms and a sun deck on top. We were soon on our way out into the rocky field. It truly is something you have to experience, as pictures don't really do the place justice. You enter a labyrinth of hundreds of huge rocky outcrops, that quickly surround you as you navigate through. We travelled through amongst the maze for a few hours, within everyone settling in before having a really nice lunch on the boat. With everyone chilling on the sun deck, drinking beers and chatting we finally reached our anchor point. We were in the centre of a ring of rocky sentinels next a local floating village. We had all been itching to jump off the boat with it being so hot, and so we finally got our chance. Me and Tom quickly had backflips as the preferred method of falling and so there are some good GoPro videos to some of us backflipping off the side of our 8m boat. Once we had cooled off a bit we jumped into some kayaks and explored the floating village by sea. It was a pretty cool place, all held up by big styrofoam blocks. There were a surprising number of dogs that bounded backwards and forwards across their tiny floating islands as we swam past. We weren't in the kayaks for too long as we started to get a bit dehydrated, so we went back to the boat and got some water and resumed jumping off. As the sun started to drop at about 6 everyone was on the roof chilling before going down for dinner. It was another excellent meal of the boat, with plenty of food. It was one of the girl's birthday and so we had some cake afterwards as well. After cake we all stayed around the table and played some drinking games (mainly the sign game). We slowly wandered up onto the sun deck and chilled under the glow of a full moon. The company running our tour had two boats and so we had anchored right next to our sister ship. They had a karaoke on their ship so we went over and had a bit of a sing as well. I ended up going onto their sun deck and playing more drinking card games with some of the guys I had met. We played for ages and had a good chat until about 4 in the morning when we gave in on the hope of staying up to see the 5:30 sun rise and went to bed.