Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Last night on the sleeper train we finished playing card games and eating food and then I climbed into my sleeping bag liner ready to fall fast asleep. Then came the scream - "MOUSE", Rachel and Sophie who were on the 2 bottom bunks were screaming their head off. I looked over expecting to see just a big cockroach or something not that scary, but sure enough there was a mouse (smaller then a small cockroach). By this time all the rest of the group were all out of the carriages coming to see what was going on. I did the only sensible thing, I climbed out of bed, put on me shoes, tied a carrier bag round them (to stop them getting messy). There was then a look of confusion on all the women's faces of the group, trying to work out what I was doing, then the realisation came and they all started squealing "you cant kill it, please don't kill it". So to save me being hated by every girl in the group I had to let the little fella survive. So after me and Martin chased it out of the room and it came back in about 3 times I did the only option left to me - I climbed back into bed and put the ear plugs in so I couldn't here the screams and fell asleep. Needless to say I slept like a log the girls didn't sleep at all.
We arrived today around 4:30 in the morning then had a 3 hour drive to the hotel. At which point we were told the rooms wouldn't be ready until 12 (we had a tour starting at 11:45) and the swimming pool was broken (not really sure how you can break a swimming pool). We decided to go for a walk along the sea front and grab our favourite a banana smoothie. We searched high and low and shockingly Halong Bay must be the only place in Asia you can't buy them, so in the end we settled for a Lemon one (definitely not the same). We then headed back along the beach in the rain towards the hotel ready to get the boat tour.
They gave us our ticket with a thing on the back telling us how to vote Halong Bay as one of the natural wonders of the world. I looked along the beach at the litter scattered on it, looked at the mucky sea water, looked out across the bay to where all the islands should be and saw nothing but mist, felt the rain soaking into my top, and was very grateful that the Vietnamese could lighten the mood a little by writing that joke on the back of my ticket.
We climbed on the boat and headed out into the mist. We had lunch included so after separating the Rachel and the rest of the non fish lovers onto an individual table to enjoy pork scrapings the rest of us enjoyed a fish feast. There was prawns, squid, a whole fish, etc etce and it was tasty. The waitress came round and asked what wine we wanted, we picked one then thankfully our tour leader told us to check the price (we assumed it was included), it was $35 so we soon changed our order to water for $1.
We finally sailed towards one of the bays and it came out of the mist and looked fabulous. We docked and went ashore and then into the caves on them. They were gigantic and looked really cool. We had a wonder round then headed back to the boat, sailing round for a bit then stopping at another floating fish farm, then sailing round a bit longer before heading back to mainland. On the way back we passed a load of mini flying fish which kept jumping on or the water in masses along the side of the boat.
After an hour relaxing we headed back out for a walk along the sea front to wake us up before heading out with the rest of the group for a quick bit to eat. We then headed to the night market as Rachel wanted a T-shirt and she successfully haggled the lady down from 140,000 to 70,000 (£2), my skills must be rubbing off. We then headed back for an early night.
- comments
Christine That was a brilliant blog entry...just the giggle I needed tonight :) xxx
mum Your adventures are really fun to read about. Love the mouse story. Does rach remember when we were on holiday in France and we had a mouse in the holiday house? We fed it choccy bics while playing UNO!!!