I decided, whilst in Hanoi, that Halong Bay is a must. It’s very easy to get an organised trip from the city and I found a nice one through The Sinh Tourist, my favourite travel agency 🙂
I booked on a tour and the next day I was off out of Hanou and away to Halong Bay…
Getting picked up at 7am was not my favourite part of the day. I was collected by a bus that took me to my connection and promptly fell asleep as soon as I could, only waking when we got to the services.
It doesn’t take very long to get between Hanoi and Ha Long Bay, only around three hours, so the journey was relatively quick and I was soon following the tour guide down the jetty and onto a tender (i believe that is the correct term), ready to see the Junk…yep, that is what the boats are called!
The Junk for the tour that I was on was pretty much the same as every other junk in the harbor. As I got onto the big boat (I’m sorry I cannot keep calling it a Junk…) I noticed a small green thing, it was a sort of Mantis!
As I boarded the boat I was given a free welcome drink as I waited for the rooms to be organised. However, I was too preoccupied with the Mantis!
When eveyone on the tour had checked into our cabins and were given ‘free time’. For me that was sleeping time. I thought that my room was lovely, small but sweet! I couldn’t really get many photos as there wasn’t anywhere in the cabin to stand to get a good view.
Following ‘free time’ we all had lunch together and then visited a cave that is in one of the rocks.
Apparently the cave has been there for quite a long time (discovered in 1993), but there are other caves that have only recently been discovered. The greenery on the rocks is so dense that it wasn’t until two fishermen got caught in a typhoon and had to find somewhere to shelter, that it was discovered…apparently they saw the monkeys getting inside somewhere away from the rain and adverse weather and followed them!
In the afternoon we went kayaking around on of the floating fish farms. It went by reasonably quickly, but was great fun. The kayaks were old-style fiberglass ones and I spent most of the time worrying that if I moved too quickly I may be tipped out!
Halong Bay apparently has an EPIC sunrise. Usually at 5.30am, so I set an alarm so that I could get up and see it. It didn’t actually work out as there was so much mist that I couldn’t see anything…and so I went back to bed…well I say went back to bed, I never actually made it out of bed. I think I maybe opened one eye and rolled over before realizing that there was no sunrise and rolling back over again.
Breakfast came at 7.30am and I felt slightly more refreshed than I did at 5.30am…but not by much! I only managed one slice of bread with butter and strawberry jam, but I had to make myself eat it, there wasn’t really anything that I actually wanted to eat. I think that I am at the stage now where I really just want someone to pop up with a box of ‘Cinnamon Grahams’ and a HUGE bowl to eat them in!
After breakfast there was a short while before the boat moved on, we were told that we could go swimming. I wasn’t feeling brave enough, but a few of the other people on the boat jumped in. Nutters!
The weather was not the best as we were approaching our next activity: Canoeing around a floating village. We were supposed to take traditional canoes rowed by locals, but the weather was rubbish, so instead we took our tender and made a quick loop around. By this point I had jeans, hoody and a rain poncho on…it really was heaving down.
I didn’t really do much else other than come back to dry land, but the views were amazing. I will let the photos do the talking…i think that the mist makes them look very atmospheric…
Powered By Fondant Fancy 