Halong Bay - Vietnam

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Find Halong Bay on a map

This was our first excursion in Vietnam. It looked really promising on the prospect and it was nice but I got a bit dissapointed with it, not with Halong Bay which I think was really impressive but more with the fact that it felt like an excursion to Benidorm (but with a nicer destination). :-)


First they put us all in a bus for children (the leg room was worse than on a Ryan Air's plain). All the guys on the bus had our legs on the bus corridor. Then the bus trip lasted for 4 hours with a break in the middle. The stop in the middle was in a place where they take all the forigners going to Halong Bay a picturesc warehouse made of modern steel and concrete, an invitation to save battery for all the digital camera users within the confinement of this concrete marvel you could purchase heavely overpriced water, crisps and some Vietnamese objects.

After 4 hours on the bus they put you in a boat. Just like the one below:

Ours was nice and clean and the cabins were also clean and although not too spacious, good enough for a couple of nights, no complains there. Now the problem came with the food. We spent about 2 weeks in Vietnam and all the food we had during that time was great except on the boat. I suppose they were trying to save costs so lunch and dinner was the same food and it wasn´t something you would do a firework display about so sometimes, it felt like they were treating us like cattle. Now, cattle or not the places we visited were truly amazing.



Here we are the three of us ready to start the trip.

Halong Bay for who's never heard of it is a bay full of tiny rocky islands. On the way in it was a bit foggy but on the way back we had a much clearer view. See pictures below:

We had a brief stop before the end of the first day for visiting a cave. It was a huge cave with lots of stalagtites and stalagmites.

and just before the end of the day, we did some kayaking.

On the second day we had a small trek to the top of a small mountain following a path through the jungle. It was quite steep and the views from the top were really amazing although there was a tower on the top that didn´t look very safe, nonetheless Maria and I decided to climb it to the top and take a few pictures from there...

 

 

Definetely not for someone afraid of heights. Specially considering all the iron was rusted and the top was covered with a few wooden planks which looked like they were about to break at any minute.

All in all it was one of thouse MUST DO excursions which I would have prefered to have in a more "on your own" type rather than let´s take the cattle to this place.