Apparently it rained a lot lastnight but neither of us heard a thing, we slept really well again. I've had better nights sleeps in the boat than anywhere else since leaving England.
We went for breakfast which turned out to be a 'pre breakfast' of toast muffins and pastries. We then transferred to another boat again to make a trip to some caves. The guide told us the history of the bay and how it got its name, ha long cruelly means descending dragon. And the legend goes that the Vietnamese people were at threat from a great war thousands of years ago and they called upon the heavens for help. Two dragons, mother and son came down and created all of the rocks to get in the way of the approaching enemy and get them lost. All of the enemy died so it was time for the dragons to return, but the mother loved the Vietnamese people so much that she stayed and lives under the water. Which is odd because Martha spotted a rock that looked just like what we described as a 'dinosaur', and after that story it could easily pass as a dragon so Im surprised that's not part of the legend and it's not pointed out at all.
We walked up about a hundred steps to the caves, once inside it was pretty mixed, sometimes up sometimes down. It started off a a pretty standard cave, typical formations and caverns. The difference was that the ceilings had clearly had water lapping at them for years because you could see the wave effect all over an it looked lovely. The caverns gradually became bigger, they all looked so spectacular with all the standard rocks that look like certain objects like a lion, a buddha. One is well known for the 'finger ' but we all thought it was a widger. There was a turtle, which as I mentioned before is lucky, so there were coins and money on it and it's head was very smooth from being rubbed.
We spent a long time walking around before going back to the boat, settling our bills and having 'brunch' whilst the boat made its way back to the harbour. There were all sorts to eat again, yoghurt, fruit, 2 types of juice, tea, coffee, shrimp noodle soup, omelette, bacon, sweet potato,rice, beef, Vietnamese rice donut things. They went all out and it was just on a help yourself basis. We sat and exchanged email addresses to send over photos and keep in touch then vacated the boat. After waiting around for about 45 minutes we finally got onto our mini bus, but we're all separated out because of the seating.
After 4 hours we went our separate ways which I found quite sad because we've had a wonderful time with them! Included in our package with the hotel was a room to go have a shower and get ready for the journey so we went and showered, packed our bags up again from the ones we left behind at the hotel, pinched some complementary stuff even though we only had the room for 45 minutes! I felt really bad but we did pay more than planned so taking a couple of the things only seemed to be value for money!!
We got downstairs and they handed over s big bag with 4 bottles of water and 3 big sachets of coffee with lots of well wishes and thank you's for choosing their hotel. Now I felt REALLY bad for pinching the complementary stuff! We were escorted to the station by one of the porters by taxi, who helped us onto the train and made sure we were all sorted. The service has been amazing here and if anybody needs a place to stay if they go to Hanoi tell us and we will give you the details for where we stayed.
We paid extra to not be in a 6 berth cabin but we still had to share with 2 girls in the same cabin. The cabin was fairly basic and small but we at least had a bed which is more than som people on the same train so we were happy. We also had some free water which is always a bonus. There was a toilet down the corridor and a sink in the isle to brush your teeth so all the basics were there.Luckily the girls were nice enough so we could all talk for a while and shared bits of food between us all. We all ended up settling down about the same time which was nice too because everything's so close if people were still up whilst you were trying to sleep it wouldn't be very pleasant. The motion of the train was quite nice I thought, Liam and I both took a travel sickness tablet just in case and off to sleep we went.
