Halong Bay

(Halong Bay , Vietnam, 3-4th of February)

We had booked our trip to Halong Bay through our hotel. We were picked up at the hotel by a minibus and started the four hour long trip down to the coast. We were a group of people from Europe and South America together with a driver and our guide, named Thang. Along the way we stopped at a touristy handicraft shop where we were let off in one end of the shop and picked up in the other one, all to make us shop as much as possible. (However, we used Johans method for shopping, “If you have not decided that you need it before you leave home, then you do not by it”, so we did not buy anything at all :-))

What a touristy place we arrived to. Wven if if it is low season in Vietnam at the moment the pier was filled with tourists and the harbour crowded with hundreds of ships, looking almost the same.

Our ship was not directly at the pier and we had to take a small transport boat to get to our big boat.

We were checked in to our rooms and then we were served lunch. The food was typically Vietnamese with a lot of different dishes with fish, chicken, springrolls, fried vegetables and rice.

It has not been very warm since we arrived to Vietnam and it was certainly not warm at the boat. Also if we wore all the clothes we got we were still freezing and they did not put the heat on at the boat until after dinner.

We stopped at a island where we climbed 400 steps to the top and got a great view over the Halong bay.

We also made a stop at a place were we did some cayaking. We have never done this before and had some troubles to get in and out of the cayak but it was great fun!

After a great sunset at the boat we were served dinner, once again we got a lot of different plates with special Viatnemese food.

After dinner we played some games before we went out to try to fish some squids. We were not very lucky and it was really cold outside – instead we went to bed early. Since we got to Vietnam we have suffered severely from jet lag and we really needed to catch up some sleep. We turned on the heater and our little cabin soon got warm and we both fell asleep at nine o´clock.

We were supposed to start the morning with Thai chi before breakfast on the upper deck but it was so cold and nobody showed up. And Johan woke up with a headache and a sore throat, not so fun!

After breakfast, a really nice and filling one, we stopped at “the Amazing cave”. Together with hundreds of other tourists we walked through this beautiful lime stone cave and took some great pictures.

When it was time to check out Johan felt like he was catching a cold and did not feel good and we got permission from our guide to stay in our room a bit longer. So far so good….but then the captain came and knocked hard on our door, looked really angry and shouted something about checking out. A pity for the overall experience, specially as the rest of the trip had been nice.

At twelve o´clock we started the bus trip back to Hanoi and we arrived at our hotel at 4.30 PM.

As Johan was not feeling very well we only went out for dinner and took a short stroll along the street market before we went to bed.