Holiday View Hotel Cat Ba

Beutiful Island. After spending the night on the boat we arrived on Cat Ba island. We biking through the island people, through their villages, It was fun. Finished biking, we went to our hotel at the island "Holiday View" for shower and lunch. After lunch we went to monkey island, which was waste of time. Only couple of monkeys lived there and for those fo doesn't like hiking, forget about it. We went back to Cat Ba, strolling the city and prepare for journey back to Hanoi the Next day.

I'm about to leave on a night train to the Northern town of Sapa, so this is written in a rush. Halong Bay was beautiful and amazing with thousands of limestone karsts and isles ascending from an aquamarine sea. Tourists explore the area aboard wooden junk boats, which serve to accentuate the bay's natural beauty - as if such beauty could not exist without human engagement in it. The tour agencies in Hanoi advertise Halong Bay as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. I looked this up on Wiki...

Suite de la croisiere, ce matin petite pause d'1 heure (la joie des tours organises) a la superbe plage de Monkey island (l'ile aux singes) ou j'ai failli me faire mordre par un singe qui protegait sa famille, c'est normal, je ne lui en veut pas.

Puis direction l'ile de Cat Ba ou on a escalade la montagne du parc national pour une superbe vue et un FTF en geocaching (les concernes comprendront, les autres voudront visiter le site www.geocaching.com ou www.geocaching-france.com ) avant ...

Halong Bay is a UNESCO world heritage site and I can see why. Words really cannot capture the beauty and tranquility of that place, but I'll give it a go... There are a bunch of tours from Hanoi to Halong Bay and I'd done a bit of online research and had heard a few horror stories e.g. rats on board, terrible food, overcrowding etc. So after denying many attempts by our sleazy concierge in Hoi An to sell us a tour (quite possibly the most irritating character we've met so far), we ended up do...

Today we awoke at 6.45am to indulge in a beautiful buffet breakfast at the Holiday View Hotel, Cat Ba Island. At 8am, our guide collected us from the hotel and we went by bus to the wharf we arrived at yesterday. We collected 11 others from Chile and USA and then proceeded to the National Park situated in the middle of the island. Here we spent 2 hours climbing 225m up a rock face so that we could enjoy the view of the island. It was a difficult climb but the view was very much worth it. The ...

We woke early for breakfast... today those on the overnight trip will return by the boat to Halong Bay Harbour while we crossed into another province (our junk cannot go there) by another smaller junk. This junk took us in to a sheltered area close to the outcrops where we did some kayaking. We moor onto floating fishing houses - just a little timber shed floating on some drums, a fisherman (he stores the fish in holdings under the platform and a couple of dogs. After lunch we moored on Cat B...

I probably had the best nites sleep yet. Being lulled by the gentle rocking of the boat brought back memories of sailing when the kids were young. We had a nice breakfast, and then traveled inland to do a trek. Let me rephrase that....'they' went for a trek. I had NO desire to go 2 hrs up a mountain again in the tropical heat unable to breath. So, I told the group to go on, and I stayed behind at the National Park. Now, this wasn't like any National Park that I've ever seen. Basically, it wa...

After a dodgy nights lack of sleep we were delited to find we were the only 2 leaving the boat to stay on Cat Ba Island for the second night, about 30mins boat ride from the Junk. Luckily our guide was coming with us so we felt rather special being on our own private tour. Cat Ba Island was reministant of the Island of LOST and as we winded up the hills through the jungle I wondered if "The Island" really did exsist and wasn't just filmed in Hawai. Almost falling asleep in the mini van we wer...