Halong Bay - You HAVE to go there! - Nov. 12, 20

 November 12, 2010

Senne's Summary: We arrived in Halong Bay and boarded our junk boat. Halong Bay is amazingly beautiful. (Look at the photos!)

Happy to be in Halong Bay!

We were picked up at our hotel this morning at 8:00 for our four-hour shuttle bus trip to Halong Bay. There were four Aussies in the van with us… and you could tell/smell they’d had a night of fun and frivolity the night before. One of them was unfortunately sick, and spent a large part of the bus ride vomiting into plastic bags in the front seat. We actually felt quite sorry for her. The driver never stopped for her, just kinda ignored her. At one point he pulled over and told her to throw the bag out the window onto the edge of the highway… (no littering fines here!)… and she almost hit a kid in the head passing us on the right on his bike. Imagine… you’re riding your bike down the highway and you get hit in the head with a bag of vomit… icky… luckily, she saw him at the last second and waited until he had passed to throw it!

The one thing that really struck me for at least the first hour and a half of our ride was the intense amount of smog. It was thick like I’ve never seen it before. I wish now that I’d pulled out the camera to take a picture. It was so thick it was almost like fog (but yellow). Steve likens it to the fog rolling in off the ocean in Victoria (but yellow!). Neither of us has ever seen anything like it.

When we arrived at Halong Bay (sunny and no more smog!) we took a tender to our junk boat. 

These are the tenders to the junk boats.

Neither of us is sure why it’s called a junk boat… it wasn’t junkie at all. We asked the tour guide on the boat and he said there is no word "junk" in Vietnamese, and that the word was taken from the Chinese. He didn’t know why they were called junk boats either.

After we boarded our boat and had our welcome drink and cool towel <insert contented sigh here>, we checked into our room. 

Steve enjoying the cool towel!

It was small, but lovely. The floors, ceiling and walls were all wood, we had air conditioning, a private bathroom with a shower with hot water, and a very comfy bed with nice linens. (It’s all about the bed!) We also had a nice sized window overlooking Halong Bay.

Our room

After giving us some time to get organized they called us up for lunch. There were only seven cabins on the ship for passengers, so about 14 passengers and 8 crew on the boat all together.

This is the proper technique for driving a junk boat 😉

The dining room was very pretty… all wood again with windows all the way around. The tables had real tablecloths and napkins… this is not the way we are used to travelling anymore!

The dining room

On the table was a little card that said, “first lunch” and then listed 10 things.  (Make sure you look at the photo showing the 10 menu items!) We assumed that meant you should pick from the list. Nope. They brought you all 10 things. I am not making this up. It was an obscene amount of food. It was sooooo tasty though! They would bring you one dish at a time, and before you could even finish it there was another dish brought to your table!

Besides the food, the best part about lunch was the view out the window. I can’t tell you how many times I said, “This is sooooo beautiful”. If you have never been to Halong Bay I would highly recommend it as one of the places in the world that is a must see. It is absolutely gorgeous!

The view while we ate lunch.

After lunch (it was long and delicious!) our boat docked at what they like to call the “Surprise Cave”. There was no clear reason given for the name… but I have my suspicions… I’ll let you make your own judgment when you see the photo!

Where you enter the surprise cave.

You had to walk up a lot of steps to get to the surprise cave but it was worth it. It was GIGANTIC! We spent about half an hour walking through the cave. The guide was pointing out stalactites that looked like things… a turtle, a dragon, the object that I think started the “surprise” name, and more 😉

The "surprise" is located to the right of the mid pillar... illuminated in read...

They have chosen to use some interesting coloured lights to feature things, which I thought was a wee bit tacky… but hey… it would be awfully dark in there without lights! Steve absolutely loved the cave.  He said it was right out of Tomb Raider “insert dreamy Angelina Jolie reference here”.

View from the cave looking back towards the boats.

After the cave, we reboarded our boat and sailed to a beach where we could go for a swim.

These boats row up beside your boat to try to sell you things. 
Check out the back... she's cooking back there!

Steve stepped in, and then opted out… germs… I chose to ignore the possible dirtiness of the water (there are a lot of boats), and went for a refreshing swim (I didn’t put my mouth in the water though…)

We spent about an hour on the beach and then headed back to our boat where there was fresh fruit waiting for us up on the main deck. Then we had some time to relax and enjoy the view before dinner.

When we headed up for dinner we noticed another little card on the table with ten food items listed… uh oh… who can eat that much food??? Not me. I threw in the towel about halfway through dinner. I tried to eat a little bit of everything and each thing was delicious (even the squid and clams which I was a bit squeamish about, but tried anyway!)

Oh no! Another 10 items for dinner!

After dinner Steve rolled me back to the cabin to sleep. (Okay, he didn’t roll me back… but I was F-U-L-L!!!!)