Accountant Adventures: Halong Bay

Yesterday when we arrived at our hotel we needed to get our laundry done and the hotel manager said he could get it done for us by last night, so we unloaded everything on him. I literally only had the clothes I was wearing. When we got back to our hotel last night not only was our laundry not done yet but it wasn't even in the hotel to recover our dirty clothes. The problem being that we were supposed to be going to Halong Bay at 8am. The manager told me to come down in the morning and we would get the laundry together.

I went down to reception at 7am to go with the owner to get our laundry, "They will bring it very soon, I will call your room" he assured me. When it was 7:50am and we still didn't have our laundry we went to the lobby to have breakfast and to wait. I was wearing yesterdays clothes still, which probably weren't even clean when I put them on. When we got to the lobby our laundry was sitting in the corner all clean, I hadn't gotten a phone call. I grabbed the clean clothes and ran upstairs to change and pack and then stuffed my face with bread and banannas for breakfast.

Our bus to Halong Bay picked us up at 8:30am and was already full of old people. Janelle and I were at least 20 years younger than everyone else a product of booking the fancy cruise. The drive to Halong Bay from Hanoi is 3.5 hours. We stopped along the way to use the toilets and have snacks at a store that employs disabled people in making crafts.

The cross stitching was absolutely amazing, you would have thought it was a painting if you didn't look close up at the pictures. Along the way our guide gave us lots of facts about Hanoi and Halong Bay, all of which have since escaped my brain.

A quick summary of our two days on the boat:

Day 1: Boarded the boat, checked into our room which was one of the nicest we have stayed in anywhere in Asia, had lunch which had so much food we had to clean plates so the staff could put all of the plates on the table, visited a floating village and explored it on a kayak, had fresh fruit and sunset drinks, learned to make Vietnamese spring rolls, climbed 400+ steps to the top of Titop Island not so easy after two glasses of wine, back on the boat for a huge dinner and drinks.

Day 2: Breakfast at 7am, I was too lazy to attend 6am Tai Chi, took a boat to The Surprising Cave, back on the boat for lunch, back to the pier to disembark.

We shared our meal tables with two American guys, one who lives in Valencia, and a Vietnamese woman who was married to one of the Americans. They were really nice and having the Vietnamese woman to talk with and explain things about both Vietnamese food and culture was invaluable. The trip was really great, minus some poor planning in putting drinking before climbing stairs, but it was well worth the money.

The bus rushed us back to Hanoi to get picked up and head to Sapa on a night train.

The Floating Village