Vietnam - Halong Bay - Pirates of the South China Sea

To escape the blahness of Hanoi, we went all out and sprung for a 3 day minicruise through Halong Bay. After an always delightful three hour ride in a crowded minibus with tempermental a/c, we board a renovated junk ship (three floor vessel) and set sail. Halong Bay is so beautiful! Everywhere you look there are limestone cliff islands and green waters. Unfortunately because of all the tourist boats, there's also hidden pockets where some ships have dumped their garbage into the ocean, so you see the odd bottle, cucumber or wooden chair float past your boat.



Our first day we cruised for three hours to get to a quieter bay to kayak. Yup, sea kayaking. They took us through the caves under the limestone cliff islands into hidden lakes where we could see monkeys on the land and jellyfish in the water. On that note, guess who held a jellyfish tentacles down in her palm?! Naturally, it was a non-stinging one, but pretty cool all the same - felt a bit like a heart beating in my hand. We spent the night on a private beach island with 20 other people overlooking Cat Ba island across the bay. You'll be pleased to know that we, Team Eastern Canada, beat Team Western Canada (Craig and Charity from Vancouver) in the national championship foosball tournament, although we were whomped in the international finals against Team France (Elsa and Pierre from Paris).



Over the next two days, we changed boats three more times and ended up kayaking and swimming again in the afternoon, with our new tour friends of the day staring at us as they overheard us singing "The Littlest Worm I Ever Saw", "The Other Day I Met a Bear" and "The Princess Pat" while paddling the Bay. We then walked the plank and jumped off the ship to swim (a few bruises on my leg from a botched entry into the water) and relax before our seven course seafood dinner (pretty sure it was caught off the back of the boat!). The tour also included a stop at the Amazing Cave which was pretty amazing. Less amazing was the heat exhaustion I got from standing around in said cave for an hour. And even less amazing than that was feeling sick the rest of the day as we traveled 4 hours back to Hanoi then took our flight to Bangkok and didn't get to a bed until 1am.