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Greetings from Hanoi!
We arrived safe and sound after another very long journey plus an attempted sleep in the airport which was probably the most uncomfortable nights sleep ever!! But hey ho, Hanoi is very busy the traffic is crazy we have never seen so many mopeds and there are literally no rules, we quickly realised the only way to cross the road is to venture out very slowly and dodge the mopeds who beep constantly!! Slightly hectic but its all part of the character of Hanoi.
Day one we checked in to our hostel, we are in a popular hostel that is huge and really good, kind of reminds us of Walkabout but with comfy beds upstairs. The atmosphere is really good and we met loads of people as soon as we arrived. We ended up spending the first night drinking with the people we met here, they have happy hour 5-7pm every day on any drink...we were loving it!! We then found ourselves in a pub quiz with a team of Americans, Welsh, South African and Aussies...i'm sad to say we lost miserably but it was funny, in the end we were going for comical answers :) We then moved to a street bar, which essentially was just plastic stools with a man giving out cans of beer for just 30p!! Theres a rule here where the more basic the seat the cheaper the beer so again this was good fun! Finally we ended up in a bar dancing with a load of Vietnemese people, all in all it was a great night!! I also must mention Vicki's encounter with a shoe fixer (I can;t remember the name of this) so anyway we were walking along trying to find the travel agents to book our Halong Bay trip when Vicki;s foot was grabbed and the guy started tio glue her shoes together!!! I couldn;t stop laughing as Vicki was trying to say no its ok, but the man wasn;t having any of it and the next minute her shoe was off and the man was grabbing a stool for her to sit on...eventually when he understood us saying 'no money to pay' he stopped but Vicki was pretty happy as she got her shoe fixed for free but was just so random, he came from nowhere!!
Day two and our trip to Halong Bay began. We went for 3 days and 2 nights as this gave us a chance to see both Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island. There were about 16 of us, all different nationalities including Finnish, Belgian, French and Aussies. We all got on well and the whole trip was amazing. It began with a 4 hour bus journey to Halong Bay dock, from there we boarded the Monkey Island boat which we were all suprisingly shocked to find was amazing, (we got quite a bargain for the trip so we weren;t expecting great accommodation) so this was a good start. We then sailed around Halong Bay which is so surreal, it feels like you are in a movie because the views are so amazing and we had good weather, no mist so we could get some good pictures. After sailing for around 2 hours we stopped at the limestone caves which were very impressive. In the afternoon we went kayaking around a floating village...again you can;t quite believe that these people live in a floating village in Halong Bay, its such a strange way of life. There was even a lady selling toiletries and food off a rowing boat, she woke us all up shouting threw the windows of the boat asking 'what you want, what you want'. So an interesting fact, we kayaked through the caves where the James Bond film 'tommorow never dies' was filmed. We couldn;t really remember the caves in the film but at least we can say we have been there!! We spent the evening watching the sunset which again was incredible and we all jumped off the top deck of the boat at dusk...a few of us took some encouraging but we did it in the end!! We were then treated to a Vietnamese feast, the food was amazing we did not stop eating!! The funniest was lunch on day two which was a hot pot noodle soup which was lovely but they kept re-filling our bowls as soon as we finished...we all couldn;t move by the end! So day one ended with karaoke which i have to point out is taken very seriously in Vietnam, our guide Tiger could not have put more effort in hehe and the night ended with us playing drinking games on the top deck of the boat...suprisingly we all seemed to know the same drinking games with slight variations so this was good fun! :)
On day two we headed to Cat Ba Island which was about 2 hours away so we took a boat and bus. Cat Ba Island had some amazing views and we sailed over to our camp for the night which was Monkey Island. Monkey Island was lovely and really deserted, it was basically our group and 2 other families.We hiked to the top of the mountain to see the views of Cat Ba Island and after we all decided to challenge ourselves and kayak around Monkey Island, things got a bit choppy at one point but we powered through!! After a gigantic lunch we hiked to see the monkeys who live on the other side of the island...when i say hiked it was essentially rock climbing, and most of us only had flip flops. In England i'm sure we would have had harnesses etc but out here they aren't fussed its crazy, but anyway we made it in the end. The monkeys were sooo cute, there are only 40 of this species left and they all live on the island. You will see from the photos we tried to get as close as we could but they were a bit on edge so we didn;t want to push our luck and get bitten and catch rabies...not that we were panicking hehe. After the monkeys we spent the evening playing volleyball on the beach and swimming and we had a BBQ and drinks in the evening...another amazing day!!
The final day of our trip was mainly travelling back to Hanoi as we had covered around 7 hours so theres not alot to say about this. All in all we loved every minute of it and would recommend this to anyone. Its a must see!!
Tommorow we are exploring Hanoi as we didn;t manage to do this on our first day here and in the evening we our taking the overnight sleeper bus to Hoi Ann so our next blog will be from there. Wish us luck for the bus, we have heard mixed reviews of buses, hopefully all will be ok!!
Enjoy the photos, lots of lovveeeee xxxxxx
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