Service with a smile…

… is not included when booking a 2 day cruise to Halong Bay for 40 dollars or less (seriously, what where you thinking?).  Our tour guide -20 minutes late- was standing across the street, stressed out and sweating profusely, summoning us with frantic gestures and a lot of flying saliva to stuff our luggage into the very tiny and already cramped back of the bus. As I hesitantly -startled by this warm welcome- told him my bag wouldn’t fit anymore he disagreed with a firm kick to the luggage already inside and threw his full body weight in to show me just how ‘well’ the bag does fit. There. Easy does it. Now get inside the bus, shut up and start enjoying yourself.

“We a’e going to Halong Bayyyyy. Weather is nice, no lain, so no wollies anymo’e! I allanged for you betta boat, so you can call me supaman!” So superman took our passports away from us and like a group of stifled hostages, too afraid to speak up, we let ourselves being flocked through an overcrowded cave onto our supa boat.  We swam inside a cave, kayaked through a fishing village and I jumped off the boat, the very top, after 5 minutes of hesitation I think I became the biggest attraction of the day. Will she jump or scramble back to her sunbed? There is an ultra-boring  film clip that will prove I hit the emerald green waves bottoms first. They turned ruby red within minutes.

Halong Bay has some quite peculiar fish roaming it's underwater mountain landscape...



Superman even 'allanged' a rainbow to show up.

Taken from the entrance of the cave... which was not crowded at all... no...

Rowing franticaly to try and avoid a collision with the occasional mountain here and there...

As for V... well as you can see he rowed as if his life depended on it...

And so, after two days we said goodbye to beautiful Halong Bay.