Hanoi and Halong Bay "Trip of Lies!!!"

Firstly, I think I've been writing about Hanoi in completely the wrong way. After arriving a week ago it is arguable that we have done so much and/or so little. Let me explain: Hanoi is not a city where you set day to day activities. Yeah, we saw Ho Chi Minh's embalmed corpse (which to me looked a bit more like a wax model at Taussauds!) and got terrible confused by pretentious modern art at the Ho Chi Minh museum where we learned nothing about Ho Chi Minh or Vietnam! We've also spent time walking around the Ancient City and eating all kinds of amazing foods. But really it's just being in Hanoi and seeing how chilled out and relaxed its people are, which is an incredible achievement given how fast and loud the city is. There isn't so much of a pavement as it is a parking spot for motorbikes. The locals are well trained at dodging people meandering into and across roads. It's such a fun and vibrant city and I'll be sorry to leave tonight.

On Sunday morning we left our hostel for Halong Bay. We managed to get a tour for $45 each, which gave us 2 nights out in Halong. It's a 4 hour drive to Halong City and from there we boarded our boat to head out through the karst scenery in Halong. Remember how I described Yangshuo? Probably not, but it's like that only in water. There are roughly 2,000 islands coming out of the water. Some are massive tall limestone cliff edges. Others are small outcrops barely bigger than the boat. It also includes Cat Ba Island, a massive inhabited island with amazing natural beaches and some excellent trekking. Sunday afternoon was spent drifting lazily through the islands, viewing one of the worlds most beautiful natural settings. We then got a kayak and paddled around the islands for an hour. It was great fun and surprisingly flat considering we were in the sea! We then swam around the boat for a while, diving and flipping off it. That evening the boat went to some islands further out to see and we watched as the sun went down and the moon came up. It was absolutely incredible. The moon was nearly as bright as the sun!! When the boat anchored we sat on top of the boat having some drinks with the other people on our tour.

We quickly made friends with Philip, Emily and Andy and as the conversation slipped from discussing who was from where, what they do, where they've been, etc, etc, to talking about Channel 4's 101 worst sexual accidents, it became abundantly clear we made some new friends. Also on the boat were some girls we all became annoyed with after a short period of time. Fresh out of school they'd come out traveling for a massive piss up. As Philip pointed out the next day, you often find in SE Asia that you are lumped together on tours speaking to people you wouldn't associate with at all in England. We all got quite drunk and had a great time in the middle of the night throwing ourselves off the roof of the boat into the sea. The crew got a little annoyed with this but Andy (new Andy) "politely" explained to them that this is what we have paid for and we want to enjoy ourselves. It worked, and we really did enjoy ourselves!!

The following day we got up early to get some breakfast and before long we were in Cat Ba Island. We got dropped off at a completely different hotel to what we were told when we bought the tour but it didn't matter since we got a shower got some superb food and headed out. Me and Andy (Hodgson) decided to rent kayaks and go out into the sea hoping to find the beach that the others were heading to. This turned out to be a bit of a life risk as further out to sea the waves are incredible choppy and actually really scary. Never mind the fact that my oar broke in two while I was paddling! If we had separate kayaks it might have been disastrous, but me and Andy were in the same one so we just about got out okay. It was fun though and we did find out own little beach that you can't get to from roads or paths. There were massive chunks of fossilized coral that looked really cool.

We decided to drop the kayaks and the oars (or at least one oar and a half of another) back and got a motorbike to the beach. We spent a few hours chilling out at the beach which got extremely busy by the time we left to go back and get some food. After another excellent meal we played some pool and I decided to head up to bed. We spent the next day basically traveling back. Not that this was a problem since traveling through Halong is just incredible. We got back to the hostel at about 4pm yesterday and at 6 we met up with Andy, Phil and Emily to go get some dinner. This turned out to be a mission to get pizza. We faced restaurants not having pizza, pizza being to expensive and a power cut, cutting out power for pizza!! Eventually we got some pizza and by the time we were half way through the others had to rush off as they needed to get a train.

Today we relax and tonight we head to Hue. You may be wondering what the title "Trip of Lies!!!" entails. Basically we call it trip of lies since the tour operaters lied to us about a lot of things in this tour. It was supposed to be catered but they didn't supply water, nor were we allowed to bring our own. They said we'd have fans in our room but mine and Andy's didn't work and Alice and Briony didn't have one. They said we'd be in a hotel near the beach and it turned out we were in a completely different one. Not that this really matters but we are in the process of getting some money back from the tour operator. I need to check out so bye now!!!