Day 21 - Ha Long Bay to Hue

Trip Start Sep 02, 2007

243

Trip End May 01, 2008

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Flag of Vietnam Hue, Vietnam
Sunday, September 23, 2007

We woke early, looked out the window and it was absolutely beautiful outside :)

We were moored in a very picturesque bay, surrounded by 20-30 other junks, it was very pretty.

We knew that not many people have a view like that when they wake up, so we felt really lucky.

It was cloudy pretty much all day yesterday except for the final couple of hours, but today was a knockout, blue skies, green islands, white sandy beaches, that's more like it! ;)

We had a pretty rough breakfast of what tasted like McEggs served with very processed white bread, with the usual VERY sweet Vietnamese coffee which felt like your teeth were rotting as you drank it!

Our captain then upped anchor and went off to collect our other crew-mates (ah-haaah me hearties) from the hotel on the island.

After collecting them, which predictably took about 4 times longer than it should have done, we took what appeared to be exactly the same route past exactly the same islands that we had already done twice yesterday!

Still, it looked pretty beautiful around us, so we couldn't really complain...

Katie even let me take a photo of her, so she MUST have been enjoying the views!

Everything here is apparently very tightly controlled by the communist Government, so again there were probably about 30 identical boats all in one long procession ('floatilla'?), all following EXACTLY the same route. It was ridiculous, especially considering how many other islands there were all around us.

Some of the guys on our boat wanted to swim/jump off the top deck of the junk, but our tour guide was having none of it.

"It's illegal" he said, as we struggled to hear him over the splashes of people jumping into the bay from every boat around us! The Dutch guys were NOT amused, they really fancied it.

It seemed to be another example of people being unfriendly and unhelpful, we've seen a lot of that here so far in just a few days. Vietnam seems to be a pretty deceitful place so far to be honest, unfortunately we're learning not to trust a word that anyone selling us anything says to us. People in tourist agents, hotels, transport etc will look you in the eyes and lie to your face.

Par for the course, the "full 2nd day" on the tour plan that we were shown in the tour offices in Hanoi turned out to be absolute cobblers, all we did was take the boat back to the harbour, passing a couple of rocks on the way which are apparently "the symbol of Ha Long Bay".

The rocks were supposed to look like "fighting cocks", but to my eyes they didn't look anything like Rob Harper & that dude Tim in Chamonix?! "JOG ON MATE!" ;)

Seriously, someone must have been on one hell of an LSD trip to think that these rocks looked like chickens?

The hour long journey back to the port left us feeling rather ripped-off when we arrived back at the harbour before 11am!

Nice "two day" tour... we probably had about 3 hours of daylight on the boat yesterday, even less this morning, and we even covered exactly the same route on both days!

The only consolation was that EVERYONE on all of the junks had been ripped-off, it wasn't just us.

As was horribly predictable, when we got onto dry land, we then spent the next hour sitting at the ferry building waiting for our mini-bus home to arrive to take us back to Hanoi. Why couldn't we have just had more time on the boat?

When the mini van finally arrived we jumped in and went literally 5 mins up the road for some lunch, which was absolutely identical to the other 3 meals we'd had on the ship!

This lunch did enable us to get to know the Aussie couple, Peter & Di, who are absolutely lovely. They live in Melbourne & gave us some good advice & ideas for when we arrive there. Di was even kind enough to give us her number, so we can hopefully grab a drink or some food with them when we pass through in November.

It was then back in the bus and off to the next stop, which was (surprise surprise) a traditional craft shop by the side of the road where you could buy overpriced drinks and all manner of other crap. They did have pickled cobras though, that was suh-weeeet, I definitely wanted one of those ;)

It was at this point that I stunned the Swedish girls with my incredible knowledge of the Swedish language, which mainly consists of my ability to say "you little sh*t" (din lila huit)!

We swapped notes on travelling through S.E. Asia; we're basically doing the same trip as them, but from opposite directions. They go to Laos next where we've just been, while we go to Cambodia where they've just been... It's cool when you can swap travel tips with people, I'd take first-hand advice over a travel guide any day of the week.

The Dutch guys were also good fun, I finally had someone to talk FOOTBALL with... HALLELUJAH!

Thankfully Liverpool have a couple of good Dutch players and one of the Dutch boys was also a Liverpool fan, so that was a fun 10 minutes for me. (I didn't know that we'd been held at Anfield by Chelsea at that point, otherwise we'd have been a bit less happy!)

Eventually we got back to Hanoi, late (natch), and had some time to re-pack our bags for the night train south.

We also had a bit of time to look at flights to the beaches of Phu Quoc Island (to the south west of Ho Chi Minh City) where we're going to hopefully relax before we fly to Hong Kong and then back to the U.K. for Milly's wedding in a couple of weeks.

We just had time to grab some nice food (nasi goreng & mango shake, mmmmmm) before getting to the station, and after locking all our gear up in our carriage we prepared for the DELIGHTFUL 14 hour rail journey ahead of us!