We wanted to go to Halong Bay and we were thinking that it would be cheaper to arrange everything by ourselves, but when we started looking at tours, we were able to find one for $35 for 2 days, 1 night. We calculated if we arranged everything our own, it would probably come out to about $40, so we decided to just take the tour.
We rode in a mini van from Hanoi for about 2 hours to Halong city and then got on our boat. We had a really nice group, a couple of girls from England, a guy from England, 2 Dutch boys, one family from New Zealand, a guy from Japan and a couple from France.
Halong bay was really pretty, but it was a bit more polluted then I would have imagined. Big boats were everywhere and the water was quite filthy.
We went to some caves. They were huge and really cool.
The sunset over the bay was really nice. The islands looked like they were going on forever.
We wanted to wake up early for the sunrise, but when the alarm rang, I looked out the window and it was cloudy so decided to go back to sleep until breakfast.
After breakfast we went kayaking around the bay a little bit. We found this really cool under the rocks and kayaked in, but apparently we weren't allowed to be in there because our guide came and fetched us out.
After we got back, we had dinner with the English girls and Dutch boys before we had to make our way over to the train station to catch our night train to Sapa.
Our plan was to walk to the train station, but since we were running a little late, we decided that if we could find a moto for a decent price we would take that. We were able to find one finally, but it as a bit of a trick. He out Erkka's big bag in front, got on, Erkka got on behind him, and then me with my big backpack, our small backpacks hanging off the side. Before coming to Asia, I would have never imagined how much could fit onto one small motorbike!
No comments:
Post a Comment