The overnight train was a huge success and it could have been otherwise. We discovered that we were in separate cabins but at least two and two. Grace was not very happy about who might have been sharing with us. Terry and Ella shared with a French man. In the middle of the night, Terry was woken up and told to move berths because he was sleeping in the bottom bunk when his ticket showed a top bunk. Absolutely not to be done apparently. Grace and I both sighed with great relief when a lovely older Vietnamese man and a younger girl came into our cabin. We spent many hours happily chatting away, often using sign language to communicate with the older man who did not have a word of English. A second language would have been very useful for us with our interaction with many people we have met. I think if we had a bit of French then we could get a little grasp of Spanish and Italian. The girl, Anh acted as translator. Grace came up with a game to play and it was a great way for her to join in with the cultural exchange. Needless to say, she was right in her element and often hopped to Terry's cabin to report the stories and come back with news from his cabin. All very entertaining and new for her to realise you can speak to absolute strangers and it is okay and they are not so different from us. We arrived in Hanoi at 4.30 am, grabbed a taxi and sat outside the office where we needed to get our Halong bay tickets, in the dark. Grace was not happy and Ella fell asleep on top of the bags. I loved watching Hanoi wake up. There were people jogging, walking, old ladies carrying their panniers full of fruit, locals sweeping the front steps and ladies setting up their corner cafes with their plastic chairs and huge pots of soup and noodles and fried tofu.
Halong Bay was spectacular in lots of ways and shocking in others.
It was crazy busy with tourists and there were boats and people everywhere. It seemed like chaos and yet the tour guides knew what they were doing and who was in their group. Before long we were on our boat and heading into the bay. It didn't take long and we could relax and enjoy the gentle hum of the engine and the engines of the other 15 boats that were surrounding us. The formations were something else and there were so many more than I had imagined. What they don't show you in the promotional photos is the pollution of the water. Five years ago there was none of it according to a french lady we met. Now you will find oil, plastic bottles, wrappers from biscuits, polystyrene, clothes... all quite disgusting and very sad. I can only imagine that in another five years... However, we were on the boat for two nights and on the second night, we were taken to a beautiful spot where the boats are few and the sea pushes the unsightly stuff away. Terry and I swam and it was glorious to escape the heat for a moment. We also had a wonderful kayaking experience through some caves that the boats could not reach. We saw monkeys and a few fish and a variety of coral. Very peaceful.
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