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We booked a 2 day 1 night cruise with Kevin at our hostel. The cruise was to go the Ha Long Bay, about 3 hours away from Ha Noi. Our minibus picked us up @ 8am and we were on our way.
The roads in Vietnam are so bad, A journey that should take 1 1/12 takes double the amount, not ideal but what can you do?!
Once arriving at the port/harbour we didn't have to wait long and we were soon on our little mini boat to take us out to our bigger boat! We HAD to wear life jackets, this was none negotiable. I really see them as more of a burden if you do fall off the boat, as they get in the way so much!
Our boat looked lovely compared to everybody else's, it was quite a new one! There were 2 very sweet members of staff standing at the entrance waving us on board (they were probably waving for about 5 minutes in total, none stop waving…)
We were given our room key pretty much straight away, we had booked the honeymoon suite as Kevin gave it too us as a good deal and it had amaze views over the bay (plus they threw in a bottle of wine, how would i argue with that) So for the rest of the journey everybody thought we were married, as much as we tried to rectify the situation we still left apparently fully married…
Anyway, our room was awesome! Rose petals everywhere (which are very inconvenient) and WINE… Although they had given us a bottle of red. i dislike red wine so i tried to ask for white, they immediately said no, HOW RUDE. In the end we offered 15 dollars to change the wine which was half the price of the one of the menu and he agreed, YAY
After a little chill in our room we were ready to embark on our first activity! We hoped on our little boat again and it took us to a small floating village, these people literally live on houses on the water. They never leave, they just all chill out in there hammocks and smoke weed. They like never have to work they just fish. Best life ever.
We had to choice of kayaking around the village or being taken around in a bamboo boat, we chose the bamboo boat as i didn't fancy being eaten by a shark or stung by a jelly fish as it was 99% likely we could capsize.
The village was cool though, they even had dogs… God knows how they walked them?!
Once we'd had a good look around we went back to our big boat and had a sunset party, there was no party and no sunset but there was FREE WINE… Red wine…:/ So i went downstairs and got a beer instead, then we just chilled on the top desk whilst James took 10,000000 pictures of the limescale rocks that surrounded us.
After floating further down the bay we were taken to a nearby beach, again neither of us fancied having a swim in the water as it was freezing! So we (James) made the decision to climb right to the top of the mountain above the beach to see the view! This was very painful, especially as i had for some reason decided to wear a jumper :/ But we made it, and the view really was incredible, Ha Long Bay really is beautiful and i would recommend anyone to go there.
The evening was spent chilling and eating! We had a 8 course vietnamese meal.. which included all sorts of things, most of which i had no idea what they were. But it was tasty and we shared our table with a couple from Australia, so we had 4 brains to try and decided whether we should be eating a certain food or not…
After diner the barman came over and decided to make friends with us, He showed us so pretty crappy magic tricks and some puzzles involving match sticks, which we learned and will use later on in our trip!
After a chill out on the top dock we headed back to the room to enjoy the views from the balcony + wine. oh and plus some 200,000 VND Pringles we brought from a woman on a boat! Only to learn that they sold them on the boat for 50,000 Gutted!
J&K Over & Out
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