slosh down the pepper!

Hanoi Escapade - Day 2

DAY TWO / 29 December 2006, Friday

HANOI - HALONG BAY

*Yawn* The bus leaving for Halong Bay will arrive at 8am. But we had to wake up at 7am! Why? Cos Tempest was eager to dive into the breakfast buffet spread. We chose Anh Dao hotel partly due to the free breakfast with every night's stay.

However the spread was pretty disappointing. Fried vietnamese spring rolls, plain yoghurt, bread, sausages, ham, butter, jam, pork pate, fruits, hard-boiled eggs, fried eggs, coffee, tea, orange juice, full-cream milk & some other local dishes that weren't memorable. I didn't think that the fruits were fantastically sweet but it kept attracting a stream of ants.

Nonetheless, we gobbled up the food (Remember the last entry? We were hungry!).

The bus took a while before it managed to swirl through the crawling traffic to reach our hotel lobby. In the meanwhile, we enjoyed ourselves with whatever we saw.


The sights reminded me of the computer game, Caesar, where the women will carry baskets of goods and sell to the nearby dwellers. Here, they sell anything! We have seen baguettes, joss sticks & incense paper, vegetables, fruit, flowers, peanuts, beans, peeled water chestnuts and dunno what others!

An old lady also tried to sell me boiled peanuts by passing some into my hands and asking me to try. I will love to buy some if the peanuts weren't cold or if we don't have a language
problem. The locals here just do not appear to be cheerful or friendly like the Thai.

The bus came & we trotted for another 3 hours before reaching Hai Duong, where we were to board the junk to Halong Bay.

Our guide, Phuonc (pronounced 'Fong'), procedurally brought us to the crafts centre set up for the victims of Agent Orange.




<-- Left: Look how strong the wind is on board! We had a group of about 16. Apart from us, there were only 3 other Asians. Huy & Kim were Vietnamese who have migrated to Australia. Their neighbour, Lena, was a Singaporean who too moved to the great outback. Being the ever bubbly Lena, we quickly made friends with them. Phuonc took us around, island & cave hopping.


We learnt that Huy & group are going for the 3D2N cruise, which will include a night's stay at CatBa Island. Seeing that they are great company, and Huy's exclamation of the beauty of the island, we were tempted to extend our cruise. Unfortunately, Phuonc told us that the tour group is already packed. :-(

Dinner was a simple affair. No fanciful seafood. All I can remember is having white rice, a few prawns, and those vietnamese fried spring rolls, which I later found out to be almost present in every meal I had in Hanoi!

Our bunks were situated on the upper deck whilst the rest of the group had theirs in the lower deck. They got us quite a nice room with a double-bed and toilet facilities. It was reasonably clean but we decided against bathing since it was so cold and a bit rocky.

We got to bed pretty early, for we need to get up very early the next morning to see the sunrise!

Labels: hanoi, travel

posted by slingwoof @ 6/25/2007 06:53:00 PM