Well, yes, we are doing the 'tourist thing' we're not yet brave enough to go 'off the beaten track' and we have figured that, as this is our first visit to Vietnam, there is enough to see on the 'tourist trail' without having to cope with the possibility of malarial mosquitoes, language barriers and scams which leave you miles from no-where alone and robbed. [Well according to some of the scary web sites we've looked at]

So, we find ourselves on Halong Bay, on a junk, surrounded by hundreds of other junks, crowded with back packers of all ages and stages and nationalities. Wondering 'what have we done', we chugged off in the direction of the near on 2,000 islands [Shrouded in mist] of Halong Bay.

And what a great time we had. We met our 14 fellow travellers for a lovely sea food lunch on board our junk.They were a great bunch, and we learnt such a lot from them about places to go, places to visit and places to avoid, what to eat, what to drink and the best ways to save our money. We ate and drank, explored caves together, visited floating villages and sang Karaoke [well, Dave the Rave did] we had a wonderful cabin for the night.

Halong Bay was beautiful, even though, due to the mist, we didn't see the sunrise or sunset, which we are told are spectacular.