Today we got up early to get on a bus to Halong Bay.  The bus didn’t come on time and then later we found out they had messed up the dates of our bus pickup so someone came in a taxi and drove us to the bus.  I thought that was interesting.  The bus ride was over 3 hours long and had a rest stop along the way.  The rest stop was a warehouse sales place where they were selling stone statues, embroidery, clothes, lacquered items, jewelry and other locally made souvenirs.  They had some food and drink too.  It was a zoo of people.

One of the interesting facts that the tour guide told us was that Hanoi had a population of 9 million people and 6 million motorbikes.  That seems to match what I experienced.

When we got to Halong Bay, that was a zoo of people, buses and boats.  We got on a boat that took us to another boat.  A ton of boats left the harbor around the same time.  Not quite what you see in pictures.  We checked into our room on the boat and had lunch.  There was so much food it was ridiculous.  Most of it, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to hold it down or not.  After a while, there were less boats around us.  It was beautiful, but so foggy that you couldn’t see far and all my pictures look unimpressive.  We went to Cat Ba Island and went in a cave.  There are supposedly tons of caves in the area, but not too many open to tourists.  Then we had time to kayak.  They gave me a kayak that was way too big for one person so I gave up after about 5 minutes.  Dinner was the same as lunch – so much food and I barely ate any.  There were 24 guests on the boat and for the most part, it was the most boring group of people I’ve ever met.  Since I felt so bad, I decided to go to bed after dinner instead of “partying” with the rest of the boat.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore