Bach Dang Hotel Halong Halong Bay

... A few of the people in our new group wanted to go for a trek around the National Park, but me, Jane and a young Danish couple we'd met preferred the sound of an afternoon on the beach. So that is where we spent the afternoon. Soaking up the rays and going for a swim in the surprisingly warm water. By 5pm the sun had set behind the mountain on the island so we headed back to the hotel. Dinner was laid on for us, and once again it wasn't that nice compared to the previous day ...

... Luckily we were able to finish with our trip with enough time to get back to Hanoi and fly to Ho Chi Minh City that night, before the storm hit.
Ha Long Bay was really cool. We spent three days meandering through the coolest Limestone formations that jut out of the water and are as high as 500-600 feet. It is a really unique place. We really enjoyed hearing about the origin of these formations as well as hiking on top of ...

... for some ricey things and later went diving off the boat and swimming about to cool off. Thought we were going to lose Canadian dad in the rip tide though. Bless!
We slept soundly anchored in the middle of the bay of jungly islands.

The following morning we set of for our trek! It was tough going, involving an unhealthy amount of panting, shinscraping and sweating! Climbing over ...

... cave full of stalagmites & dripping water. They had it lit up & it looked amazing. Next the boat stopped at a floating village where the house were painted bright green & blue colours & looked so beautiful against the backdrop of the karsts.





It started raining & even in the rain was so beautiful. We stopped off at another ...

It takes us a 4 hour bus journey to get from Hanoi to Ha long City, where our boat leaves the harbor for the bay itself. The harbor itself is rammed full of tourist boats, no surprise really as everyone who comes to Vietnam comes here. We jump on our boat- along with 6 other 'shipmates' - and are served lunch as we leave the bay. We're then showed our cabins (on the bottom floor of our three floor boat) which turn out to be really nice - small but all wood and pretty cosy (and all that ...

... were heretofore nonexistent. We then checked out our tiny berths, wandered around the boat, and settled down on the open top deck to watch the scenery unfold. The bay itself is enormous and filled with rugged limestone karsks as well as hundreds of other junks very similar in appearance to the one we were on. Eventually we stopped and were rowed to the entrance of "Amazing Cave" and followed our guide up stone staircases and into the depths ...

We awoke in a hot disgusting little claustrophobic cabin that seemed determined to make us hate it as much as possible. We had set an alarm on the instruction of our guide who told us that the sunrise would be amazing. However, apparently we were not to be trusted with waking ourselves up, and so even though we were both in various states of undress, we got both the guide and Dave hammering on our windows making sure that we were getting ready; both human alarms were answered ...

... to return to the hotel by 7pm. In all honesty, we didn’t want to miss open bar and snacks with our butlers. They never disappoint and we are sipping champagne as we type this very entry, again.

Tomorrow we are looking forward to a leisurely morning and afternoon before we fly to Siem Reap, Cambodia at 5pm. We have been eyeing the pool and hoping to start racking up massages—tomorrow seems like a good day to start spoiling ourselves ;)

... a Karaoke bar. Well... it turns out that Karaoke is so popular that you have to pay to sing. WHAT? We convince the owner to give us a few free songs if we buy some drinks. It takes him nearly an hour to rustle up the list of english songs. We did indeed sing much to the enjoyment of the Vietnamese patrons....we certainly got the most cheering. The songs the Vietnamese were singing were all pretty terrible love songs....at least I think they were love songs. Not the most enjoyable ...

... the white water rafting I decided to sit and watch the others paddling around instead.



To be fair, after the usual pointless safety briefing the guys who did go out were probably only left with a rather pathetic 15 minutes on the water, but it looked really cool out there. I was a bit gutted to miss out, but I was also sure that ...