Halong Bay:

March 17th, 2005

Greetings...

We are back in Hanoi after 2 days and 1 night in Halong Bay. We drove about 3 hours to Halong City on the edge of the bay yesterday and boarded a beautiful boat called the Dragon's Pearl. It was an old Chinese Junk made of beautiful wood.

Halong Bay is full of rocks sticking up everywhere. It is a bit like Active Pass off the coast of British Columbia with the massive rock faces everywhere.

We sailed through the bay and made our way to a cave. The main attraction of the cave was a rock that looked like a certain shape of the body - your can make your own interpretation.

Unlike the caves we had seen in the rest of SE Asia, this one was "Tour-a-sized" ... it was basically the Disneyland of Caves. They had coloured lights and stone flooring and stairs and the works. Vietnam goes a bit overboard in that sense, but nonetheless, it was still neat.

We sailed to a second 'island' and went ashore. We climbed all the way to the top of the island where we could see beautiful views around the bay. We were lucky that it was not too foggy as this region is known to get fog almost every day at this time of year.

Wanting to swim in a new body of water - this being the Gulf of Tonkin - myself and another girl from the tour swam from the beach back to the boat. By the time we reached the boat our hands were nearly numb. The water was so cold. It was such a contrast to Phu Quoc Island in the south of Vietnam where the water was literally "piss-warm".

We were treated to a lovely dinner on the boat's main deck before the majority of us set out to party the night away via our various different poisons. Jess and I had been warned about the cost of drinks on the boat so we brought our own bottle of wine. However, when I saw they had Canadian Club on the menu I had to try a couple of those as well.

We ended up sitting around in a circle playing all sorts of drinking games till they finally told us it was time to go to bed. We were a group of Americans, Canadians, Aussies, and Brits which made for some hilarious stories and such.

The morning came early and we took a boat ride to visit a lagoon nearby. It was surrounded by mountainous rock and was only accessible by going through a cave-like entrance.

From there we sailed back to Halong City and took a bus back to Hanoi.

We have tomorrow left here in Hanoi before we fly to China. We are meeting up with Brad & Dennyse tomorrow in Hanoi - they were the couple we were stranded with in India on the flight to Khajurajo. Other than that, it is just par for the course with only 5 weeks left in our trip.

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