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At 8am on Thursday we set off for Halong Bay, it was a 3 and a half hour journey… the majority of that was spent on the wrong side of the road thanks to the constant overtaking which left us on edge… especially when the driver thought it was wise to overtake on a bend.
Halong Bay it's self is beautiful! Pictures can't justify the real beauty of this place! When we arrived on the boat we were pleasantly surprised, our room for the night was lovely!! We had lunch on the boat then were taken to the Sung Sot caves, which consisted of three chambers, going from small to big. They were pretty incredible.
After this we got into a kayak and floated about in between the masses of rock formations around us! Lee attempted to Kayak into a few caves and I pretty much just sat there enjoying the ride while Lee paddled… each time I tried to help I got told to stop because apparently I am naff at it and it wasn't helping what so ever!
After this it was time for sunset… Lee and a few other guys we met from Twickenham decided to jump off the boat. I managed to get some pretty cool pictures of Lee J
We then had dinner on the boat… I don't think we have seen so much food since we left the elephant nature park. After this we did squid fishing… when I say squid fishing I mean we sat at the end of the boat for 3 hours while bobbing a bamboo fishing rod into the water and chatting with the English guys. We caught nothing… which, to be honest, is a good thing, because I think if one of us did catch something I'm pretty sure none of us would know what to do with it!!
After this we heading up to the top deck where we watched the storm which was a fair few miles away, the sky was constantly being lit up with lightning. We went to sleep and at 1:45am we were woken up by the loud sound of thunder, the storm had made its way over to us and was in fact right above us. So we opened the curtains and sat on the bed like two little children and watched the show. It was totally surreal.
On Friday we had a 7am start… we had breakfast and then were plonked on another boat with all our stuff and sent to Cat Ba Island. Cat Ba Island in the only island in the bay where you can stay on, it's pretty big in comparison to the other islands and there are a bunch of hotels/restaurants on it too. As soon as we got here we were told we were going hiking up a mountain, I decided against this and opted to sit with the OAP's and talk about war history and their grandkids! Lee did the hike and took my camera, it took about 2 hours for him to walk to the top, it looks like it was an incredible view.
We were then taken to our hotel, had lunch and were told the coach would pick us up at 2pm to take us to the boat so we could go to Monkey Beach… the coach was an hour late and by this point we thought they had forgotten about us! On the boat to Monkey Beach we went through the floating village which was such a surreal sight, the way the Vietnamese had built their homes on the water was amazing, many of them held together with just rope and what not. (I'll upload some photos). Once at Monkey Beach we pretty much just chilled out in the bar and watched the monkeys try and steal everyone's food and beer, yes, they were drinking beer, and seemed to really enjoy it too!
Once we were done on the beach we got on the boat and went back to Cat Ba Island, at this point Lee decided he wanted to go to the floating bar which appeared in 'Top Gear' so we didn't get on the bus back to the hotel with everyone else, instead we spent about half an hour asking around if anyone knew where it was, we finally found someone and they said they could take us 'tomorrow'… well obviously we couldn't go seeing as we were being dropped to Hanoi the next day, so I think Lee was pretty gutted about that!
We started walking back to the hotel, which is when we got lost and it started raining, 20 minutes later, we were still lost, it was still raining, and we were extremely lucky when a bike taxi drove past us and asked if we wanted a lift, that's when we hopped on the back and we realized we had been walking in the total wrong direction to our hotel. Thank god for taxi bike's ay!?
The next morning we basically made our way back to Hanoi… Another 3 and a half hour trip back (make that 4 hours after the coach got a flat tire).
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