Julia's Travels: Halong Bay, pirate style

Since starting my solo travels, I have yet to really be "alone", per se. I traveled from Laos to Hanoi with an American, Dean, who Billy and I met in Thailand. When I arrived in Hanoi, I connected with another traveler, Marcos, who I had met in Vang Vieng. Marcos was traveling with two English guys he met on his flight to Hanoi, Snoopy and Richard. So together, this random little crew of 5 decided to plan a trip to Halong Bay.

Vietnam is the place to go for cheap package deals. Usually, I've found it cheaper to buy bus tickets, book hotels and search out restaurants on my own, but somehow in Vietnam, the tour operators are able to create these super-cheap package deals. Sure you don't have as much control over the situation, but after several months of having to plan out everything, I was ready to have someone else figure out the details.

We booked a 3 day trip to Halong Bay, which started with 1 day and a night on a Chinese-style junk. There were 6 non-crew members on the boat (the 5 mentioned above and Ana, a Spanish woman who had booked the same package deal), so we practically had the entire thing to ourselves (which was fantastic). We enjoyed lots of delicious food, lounged around on the boat deck, went swimming in the South China Sea, played cards...you know the rough life.

Swimming was wonderful, except for the fact that Marcos, Snoopy and Richard are cursed with losing things. (I should preface this story with the fact that Marcos, Snoopy and Richard had their bags lost by Vietnam airlines, so they literally had one set of clothes and pretty much nothing else. This wouldn't have been a critical problem, except of the fact that Snoopy wears glasses and packed his contacts in his checked luggage.) So, when we went for a dip, Snoopy lost his glasses, Marcos lost a tooth and Richard had lost and eardrum in Laos, but that still made for some hampered swimming. We decided to swim over to another boat that was parked in the bay and climb aboard (because, why not?). As we approached the other boat, the Vietnamese crew members peered overboard and gave us some seriously strange looks. I don't blame them, we must have looked ridiculous: one practically blind person, one person with bright orange earplugs swimming with his head above water, and another person missing a front tooth, all approaching their boat, led by 6 foot tall white chick. I probably would have been scared too.

After our night on the boat, we landed in Cat Ba Island. We thought that we were going to spend a tranquil afternoon on the island, until the van taking us to Cat Ba town pulled over and informed us that we were going to go for a two hour hike through the jungle. I hadn't packed my hiking shoes and was wearing ballet flats, and the guys only had flip-flops, and it had recently rained. This made for an interesting and extremely slippery walk (see the photo below). It was a "character building" experience for sure, my feet are still recovering.

Our recovery tactic for the hike was as follows: check into the hotel in Cat Ba City, find an empty little beach, get a few bottles of Tiger beer, and relax in the sun. I'll tell you what, it worked like a charm. The guys played soccer with the locals who ran a beach side restaurant, and I taught some Vietnamese people how to swim backstroke. It's amazing how sports are so internationally understood, you don't really need words.

-Julia