We quickly found our carriage, our berth mates were already on, a lady on the bottom bunk and a man with his daughter on the top. The man ignored us, but the lady was really nice and helped us work out what we were doing. Neither of us understood the other, but we got round that by chatting anyway and gesticulating wildly.
We settled in to sleep, then were woken up by an extremely loud announcement about the train arriving at a station. We went back to sleep, then woke up again at about 5 or 6. We stayed in bed and snoozed for the rest of the journey (although I kept waking up to find various people were sat at the foot of my bed, which was bizarre!). The beds were really comfy and we both slept really soundly.
As we came out of the station, I was caught behind a ticket dispute, so John ended up ahead of me. The tuk tuk and taxi drivers were very aggressive as I came to the front, they even surrounded me until John noticed I wasn't with him and came back to grab me.
We started off walking to a guest house, but then realised we couldn't be bothered, so we hailed a taxi. We didn't like the one that was recommended, but there was a nicer one down the road so we booked ourselves into that, and booked a cruise through Ha Long Bay while we were checking in.
We spent the next couple of days exploring - we went to the pagoda in the centre of the lake, found a cafe that sold brain and found the nearest post office.
The Ha Long Bay cruise was incredible. It was really poorly organised, which meant lots of waiting around, but the scenery and people more than made up for it. We visited three different caves, one of which was really oddly lit in neon lights and another was just odd in its layout - the path through it took you around the edge, through narrow holes in rocks, under a stage....
We also saw a floating village, which had a school, shops and a bank! Once we reached the place we were stopping for the night we jumped off and had a swim. I just about got the courage up to jump off the lowest floor, but completely chickened out of going off the middle floor. John started off jumping off the roof, to the consternation of all the other guys, who were apparently planning to work their way up, but now couldn't without losing face! We stayed up chatting to everyone, then pottered off to bed, where it was boiling hot!
We woke up to see the sunrise at 5:30, but it was too misty and rainy so we went back to sleep. We were woken up at about 7:30, then we went back to the floating village to do some kayaking in the pools and caves around the village. There was a really narrow split in some rocks, and we decided to try to squeeze through it - was approached really fast, but then I realised close up that we didn't have a chance of making it through with our oars! I braked and we veered off a bit, but then we approached at a more steady pace and just about made it through!
We went back to the boat for lunch, then headed back to Hanoi.
On of our last days, we decided to do some mammoth sight-seeing to feel cultured and work off some of the food and alcohol we'd been eating! We planned out a route through the citadel and to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. When we were half way through the citadel, we realised that it's actually still in use as a military site! There were a load of guys with guns, and signs forbidding photographs. There were signs saying that access to some areas was strictly prohibited, but the arrows to the areas pointed both to where we wanted to go and where we'd just come from. We eventually made it put without being shot, and managed to find the mausoleum, which was very sombre and impressive. We weren't able to get inside, as the tours for the day had finished, so we went to see the museum, the one pillar pagoda and attempted to find Ho Chi Minh's stilt house. It was raining really heavily and we got soaked, so we got a taxi back to the hotel.
The next day we decided to carry on the sightseeing and visited the Temple of Literature, which was smaller than we'd anticipated, but very lovely. Across the road was a park with a lake, so we went for a walk.
We spent our last day visiting all our favourite places and hoping our taxi would turn up on time - which it did! It was actually early, so we breezed through all the airport queues. We had gone with Quatar Airways because it was cheapest and it was lovely, very luxurious, and the journey went really quickly because I was watching telly!
No comments:
Post a Comment