Halong Bay

Hmmm....one of the most photographed and visited places in Vietnam and our pictures have for some reason been messed up...but..this is what it should have looked like. Mind you, our pictures had a grey sky, a touch of rain, and overall were a bit more dull looking...yes, we are in the full throttles of north Vietnam's winter season!

We were quite proud of ourselves for making our own way to Halong Bay. The very popular alternative is to do a single or multi-day trip from Hanoi, which includes your transport to and from the city (a couple hours away), as well as your boat cruise around the bay and meals. It's well known that these tours can be terrible scams and people have a terrible time on overfull boats, gross food, and itineraries that don't allow you to see what you want. AHAHA! We beat the system and took the train to Haiphong, the coast town where we caught a boat to Cat Ba Island, in Halong Bay. Except...we didn't beat the system because as usual, they were able to scam out of us about 4x the actual price for the boat (I won't go into details but this basically involves lots of yelling, mass confusion, hiding the real ticket booth with a maze of fake ticket stalls and basically bullying you into paying more) which meant really, we could have taken a crappy tour for three days for the price of our 1 hour boat ride!!

A little grumpy, we arrived and sorted out our day trip into the bay for the next day. We huddled up into our nice guesthouse, had a good dinner, and stayed out of the rain for the evening. We're both reading the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series and it's seriously addictive so we're happy to be in bed reading.

(What Meg failed to mention above is that we ended up huddled in our guesthouse after she broke down in tears at having been scammed on the boat ride and then finding people who had done the cheap tours and had a fine time. It is very frustrating some times.)

The tour of Halong Bay was stunning, despite drizzly weather. We were able to be indoors on our boat and really loved the stunnign scenery, wish we had pictures to show you! Spent the entire day on the boat, had an amazing lunch, visited some cool caves and met a friendly Australian whom we had dinner with that night.

Up the next morning at 5am to catch our boat back to the mainland, this time armed and dangerous in order to get a fair price!

(We were neither dangerous nor armed)