Leaving Halong Bay - November 14, 2010

 November 14, 2010

This morning, after our 7 AM breakfast, all the passengers got into this little rowboat to head into the "Monkey Cave".

It was pretty amazing that just one person rows 15 other people. Some of the boats, from other junks, were being rowed by a tiny teenage girl.

Just a teeny girl rowing a boat load of people on her own!

We went through a cave and then into a lagoon area where there were monkeys. The people on our boat who went the day before said there were only about three monkeys, but we were lucky and there were about 20 monkeys climbing in the trees and on the rocks. Another rowboat had brought bananas and bread for the monkeys and this got them very active.

One of the bananas fell in the water and one monkey was brave enough to get in the water to get it (can monkeys swim???). Steve took lots of pictures of course!

When we returned back to the big boat it was time to pack our bags and clean out our rooms. After a bit of time on the deck enjoying the cruise through Halong Bay, they fed us brunch. Seriously… it was only two and a half hours after we finished breakfast! Once again it was a giant meal. I don't think we’ll need to eat for days!!!

Last few minutes on the junk boat. One last photo!

Side note: If you do go on a junk boat please consider tipping the crew. They don’t ask for one, or expect one… but a small tip from you means a lot to them. (One guy was so happy he actually hugged Steve 😀 )

After brunch we headed on the tender back to land. We waited at the pier for a very long time for our shuttle. It seemed like chaos to us, but the staff at the pier seemed to know exactly who was supposed to be on which bus.

This is where we ran into the only glitch on our trip. When they showed us our name on the list of passengers they had our hotel listed as “Little Hanoi”. This was our old hotel.

This is a very long story that I will try to cut short. We booked the Little Hanoi Hotel after lots of research. On the day we arrived they had some sort of water damage so our travel agent booked us into the other “Little Hanoi” which was sub-par (light didn’t work in the bathroom, sink didn’t drain, no tub, bugs, dirty carpet, etc). We asked the travel agent to find us a new hotel for when we returned from Halong Bay. She found one, phoned us on the boat via a crew members cell phone and told us not to worry, the shuttle driver would take us to the correct hotel. Thankfully, I got the name of the new hotel from her or who knows where we’d be now!

Back to today… we told the guy at the pier that “Little Hanoi” was not our hotel. He said “tell the driver”. I tried to tell the driver, but he simply said yes and just shrugged me off. (We figured either his English was limited, he already knew that wasn’t our hotel, or that we’d figure it out when we got there).

The shuttle ride home was an adventure… he was a fast driver and he enjoyed passing. We saw three traffic accidents on the 4 hour ride. All involved wheels coming off of vehicles…fortunately none involved us.

When we arrived in Hanoi the driver started dropping people off. He’d just call out a hotel name and people were expected to grab their luggage and “get out fast, please”.

After he dropped off everyone else he pointed to someone else’s name on the list. We showed him my name on the list. He said he already went there and he couldn’t go back (although the entire drop off radius consisted of about 5 blocks). We said that is not our hotel, our agent changed it and it was Le Foyer, and told us you would know. He started yelling that we can’t just change hotels and he can’t go back. Steve tried to explain to him what was happening, but the driver was angry and didn’t have enough English to grasp what was going on.

Finally we just agreed to have him drop us off at a taxi (OH I see, the taxi can drive back five blocks, but you can’t).  So he dropped us off on the street… somewhere… there was a taxi and we asked him if he knew were Le Foyer was. He said yes. Our shuttle driver said something to him in Vietnamese and then we left. Guess where he took us? Yep, back to the Little Hanoi Hotel…when our shuttle driver interfered and spoke to our taxi driver in Vietnamese he told the taxi driver to take us to what was on his sheet “WRONG PLACE”.

So we paid our taxi driver (he was very nice, and it wasn’t his fault he was led astray) and went in next door to the Little Hanoi 1. (Didn’t want to go back into the yucky place). The girl at the desk was very helpful. She tried to contact our travel agent for us, but couldn’t reach her. Then, she let us use the wifi in the lobby to look up the address of Le Foyer and then called us another taxi. This time we wrote down the name and address and gave it to the driver, and got to the correct hotel, 5 minutes later.

When we arrived the girl at the front desk said she was wondering why we were so late…. Ha ha… sounds funny now, as I am typing this the next day… but I was extremely frustrated yesterday!

Anyway, our new hotel is perfect. Very modern, nice big TV with English channels, big comfy bed with nice linens and a clean bathroom with hot water and a tub. Perfect!