Halong Bay

We went on a 2 day tour of the bay, one night on the boat and one night at a resort on Cat Ba Island.


We had some great seafood on the boat, even managed to crack apart a mini crab for starters. Unfortunately we were on the boat with only two other tourists, both English accountants. Not the most interesting people on the planet.

Again the understatement of the century. Imagine if you will, two people from an island that hasn't tasted real food for over a century and has then decided as a future profession a job so boring that it would bore the arse out of a wooden horse, you can probably conceive of the two people we spent two days on a boat. Not only that we found out when the Brits go on holiday they don't do anything! They sit around thinking about being on holiday but secretly wishing they were back in England at home in front of the tv, dipping biscuits into weak tea.


Kayaking became our personal mission to remove as much rubbish from the water as possible, this was quite amusing to the boat staff as Jono pulled can after bottle after bag of rubbish from the hull of the kayak.

The water and surrounding karst landscape was extremely beautiful. Very easy to get lost. We were a little dissapointed the guide couldn't show us a cave with an abandoned pirate ship...thems the breaks.

Halong Bay is a world heritage listed area. After seeing what Tasmania tries to do to some of its most pristine and beautiful environment I was hoping Vietnam, after being hammered with US pollution (Napalm, Agent Orange and UXO) would have a more advanced system in place to deal with environemntal pollution. Unfortunately poverty is too commonplace to allow sufficient funds to deal with it efficiently. Amazingly Tasmania (the government and Gunns that is) still thinks it's ok to pollute its waterways and drinking water with a close cousin of Agent Orange called Atrazine(banned in Europe). I smell a class action coming on!!!! Hence forth it was a mission to pick up as much rubbish out of the water as possible. People don't realise cigarette butts contain a plastic which takes up to 10 years to decompose. We gave the boat captain 20,000 dong as thanks for taking the rubbish away. Hopefully he didn't throw it over the other side of the boat.

It was quite misty which made it quite mystical and the resort was really plush which was nice for a night.

Our guide was the type that really made me see red but Jono wasn't really riled up at all and interesting reversal of roles for a few days. He gave us the itinerary which began, we will get up at 700, breakfast at 730 and leave for kayaking at 800 or 810. Sorry, the boat had four people on it but we have a 10 minute window! He actually knocked on our door to make sure we were up. Seriously dude what happens if we are 1/2 an hour late. He also liked to tell stories (which were long winded and devoid of punch lines) when we were in the middle of a beautiful lagoon when we made it plain that we could entertain ourselves. When we went 50m away from his kayak he starts getting upset and holding his hand in the air like a primary school teacher. Anyway I'll stop now.

On Cat Ba Island we hired a bike and rode to the hospital cave which was used during the war, solid concrete bunker underground which was really impressive. On the way back it rained which was a bit of a dampener on the day (we also helped two people who had slid out on their bike and broken the front plastic on their brand new bike- thankfully they were fine).