On the first of November, we left our humble abode in Hanoi and hopped on a four-hour bus to Halong Bay. I had never heard of Halong Bay, so I didn’t know what to expect. It was a pretty great place, though.
We arrived shortly after noon and went to our rooms and shower and get ready to leave again. At around noon, we hopped on a boat for a cruise of the bay on the northern Vietnam coast. I believe that I was told that at the moment, it still is the biggest port in Vietnam. Anyway, there are thousands of islands in and around the bay and the boat cruise exposed us to many of them. Onboard, we had a lunch with various seafood and vegetarian dishes. The highlight of this was the fish that was staring at me. More specifically, the highlight was the fish’s eyeball because I finally got the nerve to eat a fish eyeball. It tasted optically. (Note: At the time I wrote this, I forgot to mention that we also visited some caves. Shows you how much I enjoyed them. I was able to take some pretty decent pictures of them, though.)
After the boat cruise, we returned to our hotel. We had some time to kill before dinner, so my roommate and I had a couple drinks before dinner. For dinner, I had pho ga and spring rolls. The restaurant was close to the hotel and the food was delicious. Afterwards, we went to a nearby bar and drank until they shut off the lights not only of the bar, but the entire freaking town. It was only 11 pm, but what the hell. We probably had had enough anyway.
The next day, we got up early to go back to the bay for a little kayaking. This was my first experience kayaking and I’m sure I did a sucky job, but it was a lot of fun and we got to see a lot of the bay from a different perspective than we had on the boat. At some point during the kayaking trip, we stopped at a little beach for some swimming. The beach didn’t have sand but, rather, had tons of seashells all over the place. It was very pretty, but a little hard on the footsies. Still, it was fun.
After swimming, we kayaked back to the boat where we had another thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. (Obviously, it wasn’t Thanksgiving, but I believe in quoting Arlo Guthrie whenever possible.) More seafood and more deliciousness.
We also boated to Monkey Island. I don’t think that “Monkey Island” is the actual name of the island, but we were promised lots of monkeys on the island. We were bamboozled! Hoodwinked! Run amok! We didn’t land on Monkey Island, Monkey Island landed on us! (I also believe in (mis)quoting Spike Lee movies whenever possible.) Due to recent construction on Monkey Island, the monkeys have taken to the hills, so there were no monkeys for us on “Monkey” Island.
After the boat trip, we hopped onto another bus for yet another trip to Hanoi. We hit Hanoi just in time for rush hour so it took several hours to get back to the hotel. We went out for dinner as a group again – this was becoming a habit in this new group and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. We went to a restaurant called Little Hanoi (there were three restaurants by this name on the street on which we ate) and then went to a little outside bar for a few local beers. (I love me some Bia Ha Noi.) We stopped at one establishment called the Funky Buddha to use the toiletical facilities. The place was all about the funk and didn’t seem to be about the Buddha at all. No problem, though. I came, I peed, I left.
The next day, we were to have one more day of sightseeing in Hanoi, this time with a guide, before hopping a train out of town. I’ll tell you about that next time.
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