Halong Bay Day 1

Bridge:  We were collected in a minibus at 8am and the 180km journey to Halong Harbour took almost 4 hours.  We sat around the harbour ticket office for almost 1.5hrs while our guide made various calls trying to round up more people for the boat, although we already had our maximum 16 pax already.  We were supposed to board our boat at 11am but only boarded at 2pm - all 32 of us!  I must say that the boat seemed lovely.  A large restaurant and bar on the 2nd deck and a top deck with lounger chairs and cushions beneath the mast.  On the lower deck there were 3 cabins on either side and 1 on the either side at the back of the restaurant on the 2nd deck.  One of which we stayed in.

After a lunch of sticky rice and cold french fries we finally left the harbour at 3pm!  We made a very quick stop (40mins) at some lovely enormous caves set in the side of one of the massive lime karsts in the Gulf of Tonkin.  We spent the rest of the afternoon shuttling tourists to Cat ba Island when we were infact (according to the itinerary) supposed to be touring the bay, swimming and kayaking.  At 6pm we arrived at dirty floating fishing village where the guide told us it was time for kayaking.  Nice.  It was almost dark!!  He then said if we wanted to swim we had to wake up at 6am because the boat leaves at 7:15am.  We weren't impressed.

Dinner on the boat was sticky rice and cold chips again.  Drinks from the bar were out-of-the-question expensive but i needed to wash the starch down with something so I reluctantly settled for a $2.00 cup of tea.  We had anchored near the floating village along with every other boat in a 10 mile radius, we were kept awake till early hours of the morning with thumping Vietnamese karaoke from the boat tied up alongside ours.  And because the boats engines needed to run the sound system.  We also had our boat petrol fumes pouring through our windows!