7 October - 8th October

Ha Long Bay

Today was one of the tours we were looking forward to most.Ha Long Bay.The bus picked us up early doors and we started our approx. 4 hour journey to Ha long city.This time went by fairly quick as we dozed off for a while and listened to some music.Soon enough we could see the limestone islands in the distance, then before we knew it we were there.We left everyone else who was on our bus as they hadnt booked a 'delux tour' like us (peasants!), and were ushered off with another group.Ha Long City is a bit crap really. Just some dirty looking hotels by dusty roads. Luckily we only had to wait for about 30 mins in the harbour till we were put on a small boat and ferryed for two minutes to our boat/home for the night which was docked slightly in the bay.As soon as we were onboard, we dumped our bags in our rooms and all sat down for lunch.There were 15 other people in our group; me and Laura, 3 Russian women, 3 French people, an Aussie couple, 2 Canadian women and a weird Dutch/Thai couple, so quite a mixture!

After a lovely lunch of stir-fried veg, fish, king prawns (which I'm slowly coming round too!), some chicken stuff and more, we set off for the main part of the bay.The views were incredible! After a couple of hours the boat stopped, and we got into the smaller boat again and were transferred to a nearby island.Here we visited what was called the 'suprising cave'.There were 3 main "rooms" each getting bigger until you reach the last one which is HUGE! There were all sorts of rock formations in there. The guide was telling us the names of some of them like the frog rock, and the monkey formation.....some looking more like their names than others! In the last part of the cave though, there was another rock formation....some called it 'the cannon', however it only looked like one thing.....I know there will be grandparents reading this, so we'll just say it looked like a part of a mans body....there will be pictures on flickr so you can judge for yourself what exactly it resembles! Laura found it highly amusing, as the pictures will show!

After we'd all had a laugh at the funny shaped rocks we left the caves and the boat took us out to a platform where fisherman families live, where we jumped in some kayaks!We had an hour of kayaking around all the islands which was very cool.We did manage to get in the way of a few big boats who gave us the horn (no alec, not quite like that!), as they left the little bay we were in. We were pretty shattered after that hour, so the boat took us all back to our bigger boat where we all quickly changed into our swimming clothes and jumped into the water for a cool down! We also jumped in off the top deck of the boat which was awesome! It was a lot higher than it looks in the video!

We spent a good hour or so larking about in the water, after which we quickly showered and changed and met for tea. The food was pretty similar to lunch, and was really nice. We chilled out on the top deck for a bit after dinner before someone came up with the genius idea of doing Karaoke.....not cool! The Aussie guy and the Russian women seemed to love it though, so we sat for a little while and watched them till our ears had had quite enough (they might as well have been bleeding) and we made our excuses and went to bed. Going to our room didn't help much as we could still hear the Russians murdering 'lady in red' and 'hotel california'.

The next day we were up early for breakfast.We had to move all of the luggage out of the room so they could be cleaned for the next lot of people that they were going to pick up in a few hours.We sat out on the deck for as the boat made its way through all the islands back to Ha Long City.We docked about midday, so picked up our luggage and we were taken to a nearby restaurant for some lunch....again a lot of nice seafoody stuff was consumed before we took the bus back to Hanoi! We loved Ha long bay, and could have easily spent another day or two just chilling on the boat and swimming etc, so we were pretty sad to go!

When we were back in Hanoi, we had two hours to kill before another bus came to pick us up and take us to the train station for our overnight sleeper train to Sapa!