Tour
Trip Start
Jan 02, 2008
1
42
75
Trip End
Jun 17, 2008
Loading Map
Halong Bay,
Vietnam
Thursday, March 13, 2008
After the bus we were loaded onto a boat and taken to Dong Thien Cung. A huge cave heaving with tourists and decorated with multi-coloured lights. I wasn't impressed. I'm sure the cave was breathtaking years ago, but it's been completely wrecked by tourism. There's even a paved footpath and steps running through the middle of it. It's hardly in it's natural state! After this Gunta and I accepted the fact that this tour was going to be very touristy and just enjoyed it for what it was. Unlike the miserable American girls who over reacted when the slightest thing went wrong. Gunta and I just laughed at the disorganisation.
The tour guides didn't have a clue what was going on. There were lots of different groups and they kept mixing us up. When we arrived at Cat Ba Island, we were told to get on the wrong mini bus to the hotel, which separated us from our group. The driver didn't know where to take us and we were told we needed to pay for the hotel, even though it was included in our tour price. Gunta and I didn't take any of their crap and refused to pay anything. They realised they were wrong and rejoined us with some of our group at a hotel way out of town. It was actually good that our group kept being mixed up, because we finally met some interesting people.
Our hotel was dull. We couldn't spend the evening there. So we started drinking rice wine mixed with sprite (not a great mix!), then jumped onto the back of a motorbike into town. We met a French guy, Aymeric, and 2 Americans, Eric and Craig. Such a great night. We partied at an empty bar... just the 5 of us going crazy on the dance floor. But the bar closed early and we were kicked out...probably a good thing since we had to get up early the next day.
The next part of the tour was a trek on Cat Ba Island. Gunta and I had expected to be following a huge tourist trail, along a concrete footpath with handrails. We were pleasantly surprised that there were only 5 of us in the group with 2 guides and we didn't pass another tourist along the route. The footpath was natural and very dangerous in parts...great...this is what we wanted. Back home I'm sure the footpath would have been forbidden. When we were reaching the top we had to leave our bags in order to be able to scrabble up jagged rocks with sheer drops, to get a 360 degree view across the Island. It was fantastic. Gunta and I really enjoyed the trek, but I'm not sure how much the others in our group did, since they were wearing flip flops. They ended up with cut toes, bleeding knees, ripped trousers, a few tears and one of them didn't make it to the top.
We had a bit of free time in the afternoon before heading back to the boat. The tour group was then mixed up again and we randomly ended up on the same boat as Craig and Steve. We were spending the night on the boat, so were happy that there was a really great group of people. We kayaked for a little while as the sunset, then finished off our rice wine. I tried mixing it with pineapple juice...a really bad idea.
The journey back was as disorganised as the rest of the tour had been. We were woken up at the crack of dawn, which was pointless because we just had to hang around later. After a lot of waiting we were eventually squashed into an uncomfortable mini bus for a 3 hour journey back to Hanoi. Our tour guide provided entertainment on the bus...firstly because he said "Ladies and Gentlemen" about 5 times in every sentence, which was cracking me up. But he topped it off when he decided to sing us a song...it was very hard to keep a straight face!
