Part 2 - Halong Bay. And the end of Vietnam.

After realizing that Hanoi was kinda lamish, and we had a few days before our flight to the Thai islands, we changed our minds about Halong Bay and decided to check it out. With the advice of some friendly Canadians from our horrendous bus ride, we thought we’d skip the tourist traps and go on our own.

It turns out that you can’t really get to the island without a tour company unless you have a lot of time, patience and luck. We were running low on all of these things.

We ended up taking a shitty local bus and a motorbike from the side of the highway into Halong Bay, only to find out that we would have to join up with a day trip that started in Hanoi that we could have just taken from the beginning.

Oh well. I was a little sicky pants at this point, so I just hated everyone.

It was a bit cloudy and rainy, but the view was still beautiful. The boat went all around the limestone cliffs, took us into a cave and then dropped us to kayak for a bit. Pics included.

Again, this also included a lovely on-board lunch. Yummy.

We were meant to catch the van back with our tour group, but somehow got ditched and had to wait on the side of the road to meet up with another group from the same company. Of COURSE, we got stuck behind the biggest accident of all time and were delayed by hours. Everyone literally parked their car and hung out by the side of the road in rural Vietnam until the thing cleared up. No one was going ANYWHERE.

Ah, well. We tried. At least the seafood was super cheap and delicious. And we got to see yet another World Heritage site.

We got back to Hanoi super late and went back to the same shitty hotel. And got on a plane the next day to Bangkok, went camera shopping for a few hours, ditched some luggage at my storage place and hopped another flight to Phuket.

Yay. We were back in sunshine. And the Land of Smiles.