Ôi chúa oi! ( oh my god! )

Wow, I can’t believe how fast that went. And yet, time stood still so many times in the past two days.If you read my last post, you’ll know that things went sideways and we didn’t stay at our original hotel choice, so we had to get reception to contact our tour company who was supposed to pick us up at the other hotel. The tour was already at our other hotel trying to pick us up, they came right over to our new hotel and got us.

(Now the rest of this post might sound like an ass kissing, but it’s well deserved. If you ever go to Vietnam and want a reputable, kind, warm, honest tour company; travel with Vega Travel.) From the moment our tour guide Dang/Danny picked us up, to the moment he dropped us off, we had an amazing worry-free time. 

It takes a little over 3 hours from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay, and there was a lot to see while on the bus which made it pretty quick. 
Danny told us a lot of cool facts about Hanoi as we were driving through and out of the city. He explained the population was about 7.5 million people, and of that there are approximately 5 million motorcycles/Vespa’s/mopeds… I wanted to be shocked, but I wasn’t. Stepping out the front door of our hotel, this is what we saw. People, people, and more people, either on mopeds or sitting at tiny tables eating and selling things. 

I learned that each of the streets was originally named for the things that were sold on that particular street. The English equivalent would be silk street selling only silks, and there was chicken street, fish street, pottery street, etc. Now those streets sell everything, but I thought the history was pretty cool. 

Before I get on with the rest of our Ha Long Bay story, I have to tell you one more cool thing about Hanoi. Hanoi was under French rule for the beginning of the 1900’s, Hanoi has a lot of French architecture. There is even one particular bridge built by the famous architect Alexandre Gustave Eiffel of the Eiffel Tower. Hanoi was built to be a new Paris.

I couldn’t get a good photo from the bus, so I’ve added this one of when it was built (that I found on Google. 

After leaving Hanoi we go to see some rural Vietnam. It is beautiful, industrious, communist, and sometimes feels like rural Mexico. Except that the architecture is unique.

The homes are also really narrow, these ones are not, but most of them are about 7 feet or 8 feet wide. This photo below is more accurate..

Halfway to Ha Long Bay, we had a pit stop/bathroom break. We stopped at the production workshop for disabled people. My first reaction was tourist trap, and although I’m not terribly wrong, it was actually a place where victims of agent orange go to work and live and make an income for themselves. They have capitalized on this, but I can’t fault this place. It made sense and the quality and beauty of the garments and artwork they were making was incredible. 

The top left and bottom right are woven thread art, they look so real it was amazing. 

We arrived at Ha Long Bay an hour after that, and boarded our Junk (the type of boat we stayed on). 

I knew there wear load of other tourist Junks but we chose Vega because the reviews said they did their best to stay away from the crowd, and they did a brilliant job of it. We headed out away from the flood of boats leaving the harbour heading for the limestone karsts. We took the long way and only really saw some local fishing boats. Arriving in the bay we anchored for the night, and hopped into some kayaks for a paddle through a hole in a rock. It was a tight squeeze but really cool. After that we paddled into a lagoon you can only access by water via a hole in the rock, more of a cave than a hole. 

As we emerged we say monkeys! Macaques! The babies were playing with sticks and the adults were rock climbing. They didn’t seem to give a damn about the tourists kayaking by them no more than 5 feet away. 

I felt like I was in Jurassic Park. I even started whistling the opening theme. 😅

After kayaking, we went to Surprising Cave. The name became glaringly obvious once we got inside. It was beautiful, but it just kept going, from one chamber to the next, I was in awe. 

That night we ate dinner on the boat. We learned how to made spring rolls, they were yummy. But my new favourite thing is corn fried in tapioca. 

After dinner we went squid fishing. It was fun and terrifying. They sprayed black ink everywhere. 

Above our guide Danny with the squid we caught, no one wanted to no near it because of all the ink.

The next day we woke up, ate some breakfast and climbed to the top of Ti Tôp island. There is a pagoda with a beautiful view of Ha Long Bay and the karsts. Sooooo many steps though. I took my time and took in the view a lot.

After that, we sailed back to Ha Long port. Again, our boat took us away from the other tours, and we got to see the stream of day tour boats passing us. 

 It made me incredibly glad to not have taken a day tour, unless time doesn’t allow for it, I would only recommend doing Ha Long Bay overnight. One night seemed enough, as there’s only so many pictures of islands you can take before you stop appreciating them. Although we only saw one cave, and I’ve been told there are many of them throughout the bay. It would be cool to check those out too!

We took the bus back to Hanoi, parted ways with our lovely group, which was only 13 people plus our guide Danny. That’s right only 13 people on our tour, when most tours seemed to consist of 30 plus. Also I forgot to mention how damn lucky we were with the people we got. We had the most amazing family in our group, they were originally from Edmonton, then lived in Toronto, and now live in Bangkok. They work for the United Nations, so cool! There was also a couple from London, U.K., there was a couple from Brisbane, Australia, and two awesome guys from Madrid, Spain. We liked everybody, and that makes everything that much better.

Anyhow, back in Hanoi, we checked into the Legacy Hotel, this time they didn’t give our room away. And it was pretty nice, night and day for how they treated us. I think we put the fear of bad reviews in them. Which they will still probably get on agoda.com from me. That first night, not cool. 

Danny our guide from the trip, recommended we check out the street right beside us, as it was Friday night, he said they block it off to traffic and it becomes a night market. We wandered around for about 3 or 4 hours. Found a delicious place to eat. We over ordered and it still only came to less than $10 USD for everything.

Wandering around, we saw a huge area was set aside to heritage games, so the children of a Vietnam will learn and preserve and enjoy the games of their ancestors. We didn’t understand some of them, but others we caught on to right away. 

Wandering further we saw a whole area where you could rent/borrow (probably rent, although we couldn’t figure it out) hoverboards, those mini escalades for kids, hoverboards made into karts, etc. It was pure chaos in the best way. We also go stopped, some girls wanted their picture taken with us because of our coloured hair..? We still don’t know..

Anyhow, we headed back to our hotel to catch some zzz’s and start the next day off fresh. 

Sorry it was a long one, but we did so much in such a short amount of time.