The Adventures of Doug and Bec: Halong Bay Cruise & Cat Ba Island

We arrived in Hanoi feeling a little bit refreshed and checked into the Espencen Hotel in the Old Quarter. Not a good hotel if you don't like stairs! but cheap and relatively clean and definitely close to everything!

Upon arrival we booked a 3 day/2 night Halong Bay cruise aboard a Junk (the type of boats they have their - name a bit deceiving as they were quite nice) including a night on Ct Ba island. We spent a lot of time on the first night in Hanoi searching for a decent place for dinner, ending up several floors up above the lake in the centre of the city. Food was quite good and fairly decently priced with a nice view. We ended up with a young Vietnamese girl waitering our table on her first day on the job! She was very nervous but did quite well.

Halong bay is about 3 hours from Hanoi, so about 8:30am the next morning we met the bus which was nearly full once it got to us. This didn't stop them piling another 5 or so people with packs in. The tour guide ended up with no where to sit and the isle was full of all out packs. Every bus or car you take in Vietnam seems to want to take you to visit a shop on the way.... so of course after a hour and a half we stopped at a massive shop which had everything from clothes and jewelry to marble carvings. The bus dropped us off at one end of the building and we had to walk through the shop to get to the bus which moved to the other end. Another one of their schemes to make some money!

Once we arrived at Halong Bay we boarded a small boat to take the 16 of use out to our Junk boat which was moored a few hundred metres from the shore. The driver was hopeless. He had driven the boat so far up the bank to get us on that he could not reverse off it. It was quite amusing watching him try and reverse with 2 Viet guys trying to lift the front of the boat. In the end the other Aussie man with us jumped off and lifted the whole front of the boat which was quite impressive. Our boat driver then followed up by driving the small boat into the side of our Junk a bit to fast and made a hole in it.. well above waterline luckily.

From here we had a nice lunch with a massive amount of food (including the worse soup ever... you could only describe it as gelatinous) and then checked into our rooms. Each room has a nice bed and had timber walls and roof with some carvings and paintings, and an ensuite which was small but better than a lot we had seen. We also had 2 large windows that were about one metre above the water line which made for a nice view.

While eating lunch we drove to a bay and moored again to be taken on a tour of the "Surprising Caves"... cant really remember the actual name, but the tour guide kept calling them this. The caves were faily extensive with some amazing rock formations that looked like everything from a penguin to dragons and everything in between. After the caves we spent a hour or so kayaking around the cove and some small islands. At a glance the area which is a World Heritage site looks pristine... but if you looks down in the water there were a lot of plastic bag fish.... which was a bit of a shame.

The night aboard the boat was definitely entertaining. We spent several hours talking to people from everywhere from Canada to Nicaragua and many other places. It was good company and we had several of the cheap (yet overprices for Vietnam) drinks.

Day 2 of the tour started with a slight hangover which did not help when we got to Cat Ba island for a trek through the national park. We (Bec, Doug and two Swedish girls) ended up losing the rest of the group and having to backtrack through the muddy jungle to the bus. One of the Swedish girls was not impressed and confronted the tour guide because he had not seemed to notice that four of us were missing from the group. I think if Bec and I were not with them they would have got lost or sure.

We had lunch and checked into our hotel on Cat Ba island. This was probably the best hotel we have stayed in to date. I spent about a hour scrubbing the mud from my shoes before we headed back out to the harbour for a boat ride to Monkey Island.

Monkey Island was a beautiful little rock and jungle island with palm trees and a white beach with a big bamboo balcony to sit and relax on. It looked amazing. Like something out of the movies. Just as we arrived the tour guide told us we should watch out for the "pig faced monkey" as it "bite lots of tourist" and we were all like 'yep ok' not really knowing what he was talking about. A few minutes after arriving, with the temptation of food, several small monkeys arrive on the beach and they were quite friendly, taking food from Bec's hand, and if they dropped it in the sand they would brush it off and eat it. About 5 minutes into this a lager monkey appeared on the beach (still only up to my knee's in height) with a much redder face. As the tour guide quickly yelled and ran we learnt that this was the 'pig faced monkey'. We quickly voided this monkey and after feeding time we made our way up the mall mountain to get a nice view. Nearly to the top these was a tree over-hanging the path with 2 small monkeys in it, and one decided it did not want to let anyone with a hat, hair in a bun or wearing a bag passed. After Bec and I passed with no issues it continues to grab and peoples hair and bags. Bec found a very small monkey on a rock and it took food from her hand before deciding to slap her on the forehead..... no joke... this monkey that was about 30cm high with hands the size of 50cent pieces climbed up Bec's arm and slapped her. It was quite a surprise!

We headed back down to the beach and witnessed monkey's drinking bear and then decided to site on the beach and wait for the boat to get back. During this time several small monkey's decided to come back down to the beach where Bec and I were sitting and they were getting quite mischievous, grabbing our water bottle and trying to take it away. In the end one got a little angry and a second later Bec and I were up to our knees in the ocean to escape it much to the enjoyment of the rest of our group!

The night in Cat Ba was fairly uneventful and comprised of dinner and bed, and the next day we boarded the boat back to Halong Bay and eventually to Hanoi. We had a few hours before our overnight train to Sapa left so we used this time t explore Hanoi and have some dinner.

The train, with Orient Express, was quite nice and clean, with complimentary water in the room. We shared with 2 girls, on Hong Kong girl who has grown up in London, and one Vietnamese girl who grew up in California who met each other teaching English in Hong Kong.