Our trip to Ha Long Bay started with an early wake up call at 7:00am. Early mornings would regrettably become a theme for the entire trip to Ha Long Bay. We boarded a bus around 7:45am and we were the first to be picked up. For a brief moment we held out hope that it would not be too crowded since the bus only had 16 seats and was designed with people under 5'5 in mind. Unfortunately, over the course of about an hour we picked up 4 Aussies, 4 Brits, 2 Dutch, a Swede with his Chinese mail order bride and a guy from the Philippines. In total we had 15 people and the bus was packed. I got lucky and got a seat by the door so I had plenty of leg room, but everyone else was pretty much screwed for room. Once we had everyone we followed the sea of white people out of Hanoi and on the long road to Ha Long Bay.
Driving in this country is just as crazy as China. There are about a million motorbikes flying around the city at all times and a horn honks just about every two seconds. It quickly became apparent that it would not be the most relaxing ride out to ha Long Bay, but I did my best to zone out and get some sleep. As we crossed the Red River out of town our tour guide got up and introduced himself as "Lucky" and told everyone the first day's itinerary. Then we got to introduce ourselves and say where we were from... it was like camp all over again. I slept for most of the first part of the trip, but woke up about 1.5hrs into the ride when we stopped at a ceramics factory/snack bar to let everyone stretch for 20 minutes. Having learned my lesson in Xian about buying stuff on tour stops I steered clear of everything and just sat and waited to get back on the bus. When it was time to go of course two people were late.... this would also become a common theme on our trip. Awake now I was taking in the countryside of Vietnam. There were tons of rice fields along the way with people working in them. Along the roads people had tons of animals and one guy even had a live pig strapped to the back of his motorbike as he drove along. On a trip like that you really get to see a lot and reflect on how crazy it is that you are riding in a bus across Vietnam. It went on like this for about another hr and a half and we arrived a Ha Long bay around noon.
At this point we all got off the bus and were told to follow Lucky. I really hate using the guys tour name "Lucky," but for the life of me I can't remember his real name. Anyway as we walked towards the pier somehow a few people got separated from the group. It took like 20 min to find the 4 Brits that had wondered off and for some reason they never went back to where they had been dropped off. At this point I was beginning to think it was going to be a long trip. Honestly how can people get lost in the first 5 min of the trip when all we did was walk 100ft. We sat there for another 10 min or so and Lucky collected our passports. For some reason the captain needs them and keeps them until you leave the boat. After that we all boarded our "Junk" boat. It is not much of a traditional junk, which is probably a good thing, and has 3 decks, one with rooms, another for dinning, and then a 3rd deck open for viewing and sitting. Once we were all on we got the keys to our room and put out stuff inside them. The room had two twin beds, AC (that only ran at night) and a private bathroom. Pretty nice for a boat I must say. Once we were settled in we went back upstairs for our seafood lunch. It was a pretty light meal and since Chris does not like seafood it was even lighter for him. We sat with two brothers from Australia for lunch. They seemed nice enough, but at one point asked us if we ever wished we were not American during our time on the road. While they did not come right out and say it, it was basically a nice way of insulting us as Americans since for some reason we should be ashamed. We blew it off at first, but it would not be the last negative comment directed at us about America.
After lunch we followed a trail of tour boats like ours out to Sung Sot Cave. It was pretty much another cave. We have been to several caves on this trip and this one was probably the most boring. Lucky insisted on showing us shapes that did not exist and then made us stand in silence since no one would come out and say one looked like a penis. Seriously we were all adults.. we knew what it was and did not need to stand there smiling like little school kids. He finally gave up and told us it was called the population stick and then pointed with his light at a hole in the roof of the cave. For another 30 min we walked through the cave bored out of our minds. I am not a huge fan of caves in the first place, but none of the shapes looked like anything and it was humid as hell inside. Finally done with the cave we got back on our boat to go to the "secluded" beach the brochure had talked about. The trip to the beach basically consisted of turning around and going about half way back to the docks. The beach ended up being packed. Yup the beach we envisioned having to ourselves basically had people standing shoulder to shoulder in the water. Not really to thrilled we decided to hike to the top of the island and take some pictures. It was about 460 steps to the top. It really was not all that tough and took us all of about 15 min. Since we had been give an hour to swim and stuff we finally gave up and got in with the rest of the world. Around 5 it was time to go and we boarded the boat to head to an area of the bay where we would sleep. No lie we went right back towards the cave and stopped about half way back with 40 other boats to anchor for the night. All and all the entire first day we probably covered about 5 square miles of the bay. Seriously all we did was follow all the other tour groups back and forth across a small area of the bay all day long at a frantic pace. I was beginning to have some regrets and images of the Koh Samui tour were running through my head. We have not had the best of luck on organized tours and this one was not shaping up all that well at the end of the first day. Maybe it was our expectations that did it, but I really had visions of boating around the bay, away from it all, getting to Kayak or swim just like the brochure said. Instead we were jumping form tourist trap to tourist trap at a frantic pace with no time to explore on our own.
Dinner was served at 7pm. We sat with the Aussie guys again... more because they had to than they wanted to. It had been a pretty hurried afternoon, but I had started to notice that we just seemed to be the odd guys out and the only two seats left were with us. Not sure what it was, but being American on this boat full of Brits and Aussies did not seem to be a good thing. Everyone else either had more in common or just was not interested in having conversations with us. Now I know what your thinking, Chris and I are not that social and don't meet many new people, but on this trip we have made the effort to do the small talk thing. I have even pretended to be interested in the things people are saying, so I don't think it was us. There just seemed to be an anti American sentiment on the boat and between being generally ignored and more comments from the Aussie's I was pretty much done. Honestly its kind of weird that we had not had one issue on the entire trip up to that point and now a bunch of Australians and Europeans felt the need to be critics of America. Since I really did not have much to say to them we spent most of the night sitting up top just the two of us looking at the moon and back at the Ha Long City. It really was quite peaceful and was a nice way to finish up a hurried day. Around 9:30 we decided to call it a night. We had another early morning the next day anyway and I imagined it would be just as hurried as Day 1.
