Caitlynn, Lauren, Sam and I had a 6:20AM flight to Hanoi, so we got up early and left the ship around 4. There had been some issues with taxis around the port. A lot of them had been locking people in their cars and refusing to let them out until they gave them all the money they had. Since we wanted to avoid that, we walked down the street towards where I had seen a bunch of taxis waiting the day before. A taxi pulled up and we got in. We didn’t really have a good way to tell whether this would be a good taxi or not, but everything was fine and we got to the airport with no problems.
The plane to Hanoi took about 2 hours. I had been planning to work on schoolwork the whole way, but ended up just talking to Sam. It turns out we love a lot of the same books and movies. Now I have about ten more books I need to read.
Sam was planning to stay in Hanoi, while Lauren, Caitlynn and I wanted to get to Ha Long Bay. So Sam took off to explore the city and the rest of us headed to the tourism desk. A tour had left not long before we arrived and we hurried to join them. A driver took us to somewhere in the middle of the highway and parked. It was kind of weird and he didn’t speak English, but eventually we figured out that we had gotten ahead of the tour bus and were waiting for it. The tour bus caught up and stopped beside the highway to let us jump on. That was a new experience.
The rest of the group had made it in time and were already in the bus. There was one guy from New Zealand, three guys about my age from England, an older couple from California, a girl from Spain, two guys from Greece, and an Australian with his Czech wife and her parents. It felt a little like a huge dysfunctional family by the end of the tour.
The bus stopped at a store for about 30 minutes for shopping. I thought about buying a huge marble statue of an elephant and sending it back to my parents, but I wasn’t sure they would appreciate it. I fell asleep for the rest of the ride and woke up when we arrived at a port in Ha Long Bay.
We took a small motorboat to get to the junk (type of boat) where we would be spending the night. Lauren, Caitlynn and I had gotten two rooms, since there were no three person rooms available. We dropped our things in the rooms. The rooms were slightly bigger than my cabin on the MV Explorer, but not by much. We walked around the ship for a while taking pictures of different things before we were called up to the dining room for lunch.
Lunch was awesome! We had calamari, crawfish, and some other ‘traditional Vietnamese cuisine’ type dishes. Everything was really good. Once lunch was finished we all piled back onto the small motorboat and headed to the SURPRISE CAVE (as it said on the schedule). It was a very big cave that had been decorated with different colored lights on the rocks. It was pretty cool, but very crowded.
We spent some time on the junk as it moved to the next spot on the bay and invented a game called Pong Cheskers (patent pending) while we waited. When the boat stopped we were told we would now spend some time kayaking. It was amazing!!! We all were in two person kayaks, but I got one to myself since there was an uneven number. I wanted one to myself anyway, so it was good. I was really happy to get to kayak. It is probably going to be the closest thing to the Top Gear episode I am going to get to for a while yet. I paddled around some islands, through the floating village and into a few caves before it got too dark and we had to get back to the ship. Lauren and Caitlynn were in a kayak together and had a count of 12 things that they had either hit or had hit them during the trip. I may have hit them or been hit by them at least 5 times.
After paddling around the islands for a while we had a ROMANTIC DINNER (as it said on the schedule). It wasn’t too romantic with Lauren, Caitlynn, Me, and the older couple from California sitting at a table together, but it was fun.
Then I went to bed. The end (of that day).
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