Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
I'm falling behind again with this thing. It's mainly because we've been pretty much non-stop recently now that we're pushed for time with a flight from Bangkok to commit to. Anyway I'll try to make this one short because there are a few more places that I need to catch up on. Right so we organized a 3-day 2-night tour of Halong Bay from Hanoi. It's basically thousands of tiny little islands and some small floating fishing communities off the North coast of Vietnam. There were no young people in our group because we basically didn't do the booze cruise option, but believe me it worked out better because the booze cruise sounded s*** and you hardly did anything. So we missioned it up to Halong City in another cramped mini-bus ride and then got on this 3 deck motor boat for the tour. We spent most of the first day traversing around the tons of tightly packed tiny islands characterised mainly by cliff faces and lush greenery, took too many photos as standard. We stopped off at a cave as well which was, you know, your bog standard cave done up for tourists but what really made it worthwhile was the stalagmite in the shape of a huge penis. Oh yes we're very mature. After some more sailing around the islands we stopped off at a beach on one of them for sunset and a game of footy with the locals. Fouling little b******s I tell you. The first night we anchored in a bay and slept on the boat which had nicer rooms than some of the dives we've been staying in so that was a relief. The next day it was off Kayaking to this completely secluded big lagoon accessible only by a small opening about a metre high in the rock. It was pretty serene and picturesque, made better by the fact that we were the first tour in there so we had it all to ourselves. After some more cruisng around on the boat we went to Cat Ba island to cycle through the national park with some more amazing scenery and trek (if you call about 1k a 'trek', scam number....who knows???) through the forest to, yup, another cave. They can't get enough of their caves in South East Asia. We then spent the night in a fancy hotel by our standards on the island, having visited a monkey beach on the way to see just one monkey which immediately f***ed off after I gave it a banana. Ungrateful little s***. The final day was spent pretty much getting back to Hanoi. All in all the trip was awesome and it was good to get away from the bustle of the city to some pretty spectacular tropical surroundings. What's more is we paid only $90 dollars (65 quid maybe) for the entire trip with all the accomdation, transport and food included. And they fed us well as well with loads of seafood which was tasty as hell. Anyway at the end of it we were pretty pleased with ourselves and it took a good couple of hours trawling through all the photos, I think Ben has put the best ones on facebook. We left for the South the next day on a hop-on hop-off bus (which we ballsed up massively, next blog) but its worth mentioning that in the morning in Hanoi before we left we went to the Ho Chi Minh Musoleum to see Ho Chi Minh's sarcophagus. I didn't really know what I was expecting to be honest but when we got there we had all our stuff taken from us and then were escorted by an armed guard into this building in complete silence. Then we were taken up a long corridor and just when I thought we'd been specially selected for a cavity search, we entered a room with loads more soldiers guarding the sarcophagus. I was completely shocked to see it was see-through, and indeed lying there was Ho Chi Minh's body, fully preserved. I couldn't help but squeeze out a 'holy f***' under my breath I mean it took me completely by surprise. And he was so well preserved he looked like he was just sleeping in there. No sooner had we closed our gaping gobs we were immediately led back out outside, met by the bewildered faces of all the other tourists coming to terms with the whole deal. It was pretty surreal, I'll never forget the little guy just lying there looking so chilled out. Anyway I better stop jibbering, so much for the short blog, this is why I never stuck to words limits at uni. Peace
- comments