Ha Long Bay

Ha Long Bay was very very amazing. It’s the one place we didn’t get to when I was here with the oldies that I wished we had.
We caught the bus up to HaiPhong, and spent the night there. Had dinner at a little beer hall, it had a pretty amazing assortment of meats on the menu, from eel, snake, bear, turtle, pigeon and a few we hadn’t heard of. Roy had the beef, and I had the chicken, washed down with a few of the 3000 Dong glasses of beer. I had a fair wander that evening. I had an interesting conversation with some locals that consisted of passing my Vietnamese Phrasebook around and pointing at words, ld flip to the index find the answer in English and point to the translation, I played badminton with some locals lucky they were about 3 hours and 6 beers into their game so I didn’t go to badly, and got my self lost about 3 or 4 times. That night we went out to the big discothèque in town. 2 Security guards opened the big doors for you, you had to go through a big industrial themed air lock inside there was loads of bad music (Asian guys mc’ing over horrible dance music). The guys uniforms were this slight umpaloompa / Cabbage patch kid cross over, bad Hawaiian shirt but with bright orange overalls on, it’s also the first bar I’ve been to that had a bunch of podium dancers.
The next morning we caught the ferry to Cat Ba Island, Vietnam’s only populated island and the gateway to Ha Long Bay. We caught up with James, Camilla and Maria, well a hotel hustler at the pier did his spiel about his hotel, then said “ohhh you know English man and 2 Swedish womans, uuuuummm Mr James, yes yes?” and he gestured to his hotel and from the top balcony the 3 were waving at us.
We had a day at the beach and another fairly big night of drinking games. The next morning, bright and early headed down to meet for our boat trip.
The boat wasn’t quite as plush as advertised in the brochure, but it looked nice and cosy. We had a very cool few days, doing the usual, watch amazing scenery, eat, swim, kayak, more amazing scenery (there are about 3000 islands dotted around this fairly big bay, jutting out of the ocean with caves and floating villages and stuff scattered in between), swim, jump off the boat, go through caves, eat, drink, swim, play more drinking games, swim (they have the wickedest phosphor fluorescent algae, like swimming in pixie dust) and then sleep. Then eat swim etc. We made it back to Hanoi yesterday evening and pretty much crashed out.
Over the last few weeks my cameras been getting very dodgy, loads of really blurry photos, during the boat trip instead of turning on it just sorta beeped at me. I’m guessing it got damp during the hill tribe trek, and again during this boat trip.
So today I lashed out, and bought a new camera, had to be done. If insurance plays nice I’ll be out of pocket about $200 due to the upgrade, but this will have to sit on my credit card for a while until it’s sorted out.  On the upside, I’ve got a 7 mega pixel digicam now.
Tonight we catch the bus to Hue, it’s meant to be a fairly unpleasant 14 hour trip, but it’s a fraction of the cost of a sleeper train, so it’s got to be done.
Photos are online here