Round the world in 7 months How will you know, if you never go?

We spent only one day in Hanoi, wandering round Hoan Kiem Lake and the Old Quarter, a very cute part of the city with narrow streets and crazy scooters everywhere. Yesterday (Wednesday) we started a 3 day/2 night tour of Halong Bay, which is about 3 hours south of Hanoi on the coast. There were 11 other people on the tour so not too crowded. We got to Halong Bay around lunchtime and boarded our junk (old wooden boat), and then set sail into the bay. Halong Bay is dotted with thousands of limestone islands with spectacular karst geomorphology. The weather was typical for this time of year – hardly a breath of wind, overcast and a little foggy, which added to the beauty of the place. After lunch on the junk we sailed thru the mist to the Surprising Cave along with every other tourist junk in the area! Despite the hoards of people it was a pretty amazing cave, with huge chambers and stalactites/stalagmites. We then sailed to a not-so-touristy part of the bay and kayaked thru caves and around the islands. Without the sound of other boats, the stillness and mist and rainforest-type flora on the islands gave the area a prehistoric feel! We stayed the night on the junk and then set said this morning to meet up with a smaller junk that would take us to Cat Ba Island for some trekking! The trek took about 2 and a half hours, up and down some steep and slippery limestone slopes. On the way we passed a fish farm, and had a rest stop with tea and papaya fresh off the tree at a Vietnamese hut where a local man and his wife live. Their garden was amazing, growing everything from taro to lettuce, pineapple to chillies, and everything in between (Heth you would have loved it!). The only thing they have to get from Cat Ba town is rice. For meat they fish and keep chickens, squirrels, and of course dog – yum! It was very peaceful trekking thru the rainforest, and we even heard monkeys but unfortunately didn’t actually see any. In the afternoon we docked at a floating house (there are many dotted around the bay!) for lunch and some more kayaking before heading off to Cat Ba town where we have checked into the hotel, done washing, and found that once again we have been able to connect to free WiFi! The best thing about the whole day was that we hardly saw any tourists! If anyone ever wants to do a tour in Halong Bay we recommend Vega Travel… good food, a helpful guide who loved explaining things to us, decent accommodation for a reasonable price, and they took us to places slightly more off the beaten track than most other companies.