Halong Bay
Trip Start
Jun 19, 2008
1
15
26
Trip End
Ongoing
Halong Bay,
Vietnam
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
We'd heard some horror stories about the cheaper Junks that you could spend the night on so we splurged about but on this trip. W\We paid $95 each with Ocean Tours to get ourselves a nice boat.
The bay itself is about 4 hours drive from Hanoi. Once we got there we were transferred to our junk. Amazingly the boat turned out to be the one we'd seen in the pictures at the travel agent so we hadn't been screwed over! Turns out that miracles do actually happen, even in communist Vietnam.
We had a swanky cabin to ourselves. There was a bit of a hassle at the start as our original cabin seemed to have a plague of flies. I must have killed about 50 of the damn things before giving up. Luckily there was a spare cabin available and we were moved without any problems.
So anyway, we got on board the boat and had lunch
Halong bay
. It was about 6 or seven courses and I think they served every type of seafood known to man. Christen was in seafood heaven and for the first time ever I think she actually had her fill and didn't want any more. After lunch we went kayaking on the bay. We went through a few caves that were actually tunnels though the rock outcrops. One of these was barely higher than our kayaks and was pitch black. After about 50 feet it lead into a completely sealed lagoon inside one of the islands. The only way in our out was through the tunnel. Sheer cliffs on all sides meant that nobody could walk in or out.. It was a fantastic surreal experience. That night we had another huge seafood dinner and spent the spent the evening on the roof of the boat (top deck?) with Angela (a German doctor) and a English couple called Lee and Alex. The sunset was amazing and we had a nice chill evening with our horribly overpriced beer J
The next day we were up early and headed for the "Amazing Cave". You can see from the photos that it really was pretty amazing. The big part stretches for more than 100 metres. It's the biggest single cavern I've seen in my life and is well worth going to see.
After that it was back to the boat and back to shore. We'd only gone for the 1 night on the boat option but a few of the others had opted to spend an extra night on one of the islands in the bay. We were thinking about it but at the time had had enough of beaches and beach bungalows without power. Wouldn't mind one of those now though.
So if you ever make it to Vietnam, go to Halong Bay. You won't be disappointed (unless you go cheap and gets rats on board)
