From the Bay to Halong Bayayayayayayay

We more less ran out of stuff to do in Hanoi after two days (still some pagodas and the mausoleum) but rather than try and strech 4 hours of stuff in to 2 days we opted to go to to Halong Bay instead. If you've never heard of Halong Bay it's about 3 hours from Hanoi and is a bay full of these giant rock island things. It's really crazy looking. Straight Avatar shit really. It's supposed to be pretty hard to take a day trip there and folks really recommend you stay overnight so we signed up for a boat tour.

We hopped on the 8 am bus/van to Halong Bay, got there and were herded onto a tiny boat whose pilot was wearing a rainbow sombrero (maybe it was part of his job? maybe he just wanted to be stylin) and went to the larger boat where we were gonna spend the next day and a half. We got to the boat (I'M ON A BOAT!) and got to know the other folks on our tour. We had some Irish, Aussie, British folks , and 1 american who were all the young 20's crowd. On top of that we had 2 old japanese dudes who looked pretty gangster along with a middle aged vietnamese woman who Mr. Ota called his sweetheart. Overall the group of folks was really chill. Pretty sausage festy but i suppose that's the story of my life.

They took us to these awesome caves which were just full of insane stalagtites and stalagmites. It was called surprise cave apparently because the 3rd chamber had a rock that couldn't be anything other than phallic. So surprise! ... it's a dick! There was also a lucky turtle statue and stuff that you could pat for good luck. Our tour guide who called himself "Lucky" after surviving a drunken scooter crash, made tons and tons of bad jokes and pointed to various other rocks that sort of looked like people or monkeys. I imagine someone got really high and just went in there and was like "look a monkey! look a man and woman kissing" and just named everything.

Afterwards we got to go kayaking in the bay which was mad fun. It was my first time kayaking and I def dont' want it to be my last. we got to go in some cavey places and met some british girls that we got to chat with for about 20 minutes before parting ways. After that we took the little boat back to the main one and took turns jumping off the top floor. When I was swimming back to the boat i managed to cut my leg on something sharp underneath. Pretty small cut and pretty AWESOME.

Later in the night we did squid fishing, which is just sitting on the edge of the boat dangling this thing with 4 hooks in the water until a squid just comes up to it to take a look and you jerk it out, hook him, and bam have a squid. In 3 hours one guy caught 1 squid. Still pretty cool. We did kareoke after and I was personally very proud of my renditions of "can you feel the love tonight" and "wild horses". The folks in our group chose pretty funny songs. I must say that the dutch have very quaint taste in music.

During the whole trip hte food was basically shitty chinese american food which was pretty dissapointing. The highlight was deep fried pieces of corn. woooo.... They also charged 2 bucks a beer which seems cheap but in town you can get beer from a quarter to a dollar so it was basically highway robbery. Outside the boat tons of ladies in smaller boats come around and try to sell you food and beer which is at the normal 1 dollar price. If our boat crew caught us though we'd have to pay an extra 50 cents a beer. So if you get caught it's still cheaper. Lucky said they used to shoo the women away but people weren't getting drunk and having fun so now they just let them come by. The highlight was one of them started pulling of Felix's foot and leg hair. I suspect it was a marriage proposal.

The next day we just sort of boated around for a bit and caught the van back to Hanoi. We made a new friend named Edward from Malaysia who is now travelling with us. He's also a photographer and has got me doing high contrast black and white photography which is basiclaly the EVERY SHOT LOOKS AWESOME MODE.

Once back in Hanoi we had some more Bun Cha, caught a water puppet show which might be the most entertaining two dollars I ever spent then got the train to Hue where I'm typing from right now.

Pretty sweet trip despite the shitty food but it could certainly be worse. I'm really glad to have seen Halong Bay cause it was pretty fucking awesome.