Day 10 - Halong Bay

We set the alarm for 6:30am but I woke at 6. We were ready to check out at 7 (30 minutes early) luckily it turned out. My impression of Ha Noi is that people are most definitely out to make a buck out of you and don't care if they are pushy about it. When you indicate you are not interested some of the fake niceness disappears. This is in stark contrast to the people in the south who most upset if you were upset. So what has this got to do with anything...well when it came to checking out we had to double, triple check everything as every which way to rip us off was attempted. Screwed up laundry bill, conversion to VND mistakes, our laundry was lost, bags were not going to be allowed to be stored here while we were away, pretty annoying all up.



The confusion was added to when the guide to our trip turned up and we were still quibbling over the bill. We followed him to the minibus and were the first people on. We waited alone for 15 minutes then we did a lap of the hotels picking up 14 more people. Half the group were doing the hotel stay tour and half were doing the boat stay tour. Then we were onto the busy highways out of town and dodging trucks and motorbikes in our mad dash east. At the 90 minute mark we stopped for a toilet and coffee break. The scenery changed slowly to industrial parks and market gardens from the high tenements of the city. We crossed a large suspension bridge that sparked a discussion between Dawn and I about the properties of these type of bridges after becoming instant experts watching the Discovery channel the night before.



Entering Halong city was like entering the birthing of a major tourist Mecca. Signs everywhere about the resorts that will be built here and the hotels that will be built there. This place has big plans and I fear the place will become another Gold Coast.

The organised chaos went on at the docks with 100's of people trying to get on dozens of boats. It was hot, people were trying to keep an eye on their miniature guides all while trying to take pictures of the surroundings. Our guide purchased our sight seeing tickets for us and walked down to the end of the dock.



Our boat was there but gang planks must be uncool (or maybe it is funny to laugh at westerners having issues boarding) and so we had to climb the 8 foot down to the deck of the boat. I was glad I had chosen to wear my hot but definitely more steady running shoes, over wearing sandals or thongs.

Once on the boat we sat in the dining area and were greeted with a cry that would become familiar over the next few days "Bia?? Bia??". Vietnam does not have such things as licensing laws and you can get beer anywhere at any time, and at $1USD or less a stubbie, many Australians feel they are in heaven. We had been told that we would be having lunch on board the boat and as it was 12:30 pm we were pretty hungry. But NO! we first had to wait for all the boats that had parked us in to vacate the dock, then motor out to sea for 40 minutes.

The water is flat around Halong Bay. The islands seem to shelter any swell and there was no wind at all so those who were nervously chatting about sea sickness breathed collective sighs of relief and relaxed. The boat we were on had a deck level where most of the sleeping cabins were, a dining level above that and then the roof area where there were deckchairs. We sat on a table with an English couple and a German who works in the USA.The rest of the group was made up of some more Germans and a group of French. We talked amongst ourselves about beer and diving. We cruised out of the bay past a semi constructed suspension bridge and headed towards distant lumpy land masses.



Lunch was served and what a disappointment. Fried battered fish, prawns, spring rolls and chips. The greens had been cooked in so much ginger I could not eat them. There was a grilled fish and boiled rice that I could eat and a peeled nashi pear. Luckily the scenery made up for the bad food.

The sky haze had cleared a fair bit out at the land masses. I went into a photo taking frenzy . Every new rock formation, each boat we passed, everything was scenic. There were butterflies skimming the top of the water going from who knows where to who knows where. Our guide announced we would be touring a cave formation on an island (Sung Sot I think). I pulled on tea trusty runners that I had kicked off once safely sitting with a beer.

We pulled up at a rickety floating dock. Again no gang plank so it was a climb down from the boat about 6 foot onto the rusty welded together metal boxes that had lopsided wooden planking to follow to the shore. OHS issues abounded in this place! We then followed the path to the cave. That sounds easy doesn't it?! But the path was actually an almost vertical set of stairs (at least 100 of them) in the heat and humidity. By the top of them my legs were jelly and I was sweating and trembling like a nervous racehorse. I congratulated myself on making it up there and thanked the additional stamina I have developed over the last week or so from all the walking and stair climbing.

Scattered up the path were garbage bins which was very considerate of the environment by the Vietnamese. The odd thing was they were shaped like dolphins and penguins and your rubbish had to be deposited into their gaping maws. Dawn was slightly disturbed at the imagery.

The cave was quite good. The fact that it was only discovered by the French in the last century (or so our guide told us) was pretty amazing as it was huge. It was cooler in tea cave than outside but no breeze meant no evaporation of sweat and so the change in temperature was not very noticeable. Again more steps down to the bottom of the formations to tour the stalactites and stalagmite and then more stairs up to the cave mouth and then more steps down to the boat. I was buggered after all of the exercise. I was quite ready for a cold bia after that.



We motored off to the swimming/kayaking spot and I chose to just laze about rather than swim. The sun was setting and the whole scene was picturesque. I grabbed some nice pictures of the new moon. Dinner was next and it was a carbon copy of the lunch crap.



Somewhere along the line in Vietnam you come to expect that a stuff up will occur. The guide or those who had organised the group had made a logistical mistake and all of the twin bed rooms had been allocated by the time it came to give Dawn and I a room. We were told that all that was left was a double bed room on the dining level. I was most annoyed when the guide told me that I should sympathise (be sorry) for the rest of the passengers if I demanded someone give up their twin room. I told him he was lucky we weren't two big homophobic guys who would throw him off the boat for making such a mistake. And I just KNEW someone down stairs who wanted a double room was pissed off that they had been placed in a twin.



I volunteered to sleep on one of the cushioned seats in the dining area. This turned out to also be where the crew slept. The crew comprised of the captain, a deckhand who was consistently sniffing back snot and sneezing (yes many bird flu comments were muttered by us), his wife who did the cooking, their small baby who never seemed to cry and from who I learned that nappies are not used in Vietnam but instead an endless supply of little track pants are changed every time they were soiled.

It was an interesting night's sleep as the bench was narrow and only about 5 foot long. I had no covering and left the fan on as it was still quite warm. I woke a couple of times due to the strange contorted position I was sleeping in and teetering on the edge of falling off. The rooms boasted airconditioning and hot water but Dawn had been unable to get either working so I didn't miss out on too much.

I awoke before sunrise and got more pictures as the sun came up. The day was very hazy/misty and so I took no more pictures and we motored back to the dock for lunch. I was looking forward to a change in the diet, but the restaurant must have had the same franchise as the boat and the food was identical bahh!



Minibus ride back to town was the usual mayhem of tooting and swerving and braking only to avoid certain death and I was very pleased when we pulled up at the hotel and we could hit the room for a shower and some airconditioned rest before dinner.