I Love u “Ha Long” time

Our 3day/2nights tour of Ha Long Bay/Cat Ba Island has sadly come to an end and we are back in HaNoi for our last night. The tour was absolutely fun and relaxing. A minivan drove us about 3.5hrs from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay where we docked onto a viet boat. The boat has 3 floors bottom floor is our room where we spent a night on the boat, 2nd floor is for dinning and couches, and the top deck is for just enjoying the great view 360 degree around us. The sea in vietnam is really flat compared to the choppy water of South Florida. One complain was mainly our tour guide was not doing any guiding at all. Never told us what’s happening next unless u drill it to him. The boat is just a slow crawl along the open water and reach our first destination where we got to visit a tourist-ish cave. They put up way too much colorful lights into the cave and make it looked more like a gay pride parade. The 2nd portion of the cave was pretty amazing and we took most of the pics there. The first night we opted to sleep on the boat and those scammers wanted to charge us $10 to turned on the A/C. So i just crack open the cover and manually started it up. HA! free A/C biatch! Yen and I spent most of that night on the top deck just listening to mp3 and just relax to the sound of nothing. The view was just spectacular. There were about 2 dozen boat parked into the open cove. The slight cool wind blowing by us is just makes everything alright. Some of the spanish music on my phone made me miss home for a bit, but most of the time i just thought about nothing. We went to bed around 2am that night.

Next morning woke up to the sound of banging door and itching scream of breakfast. The view from breakfast table was just amazing and it all came along with great weather. Oh and all along the sea are little floating villages kinda like that Kevin Costner movie ‘Waterworld’. They live in huts that are floating by lots of empty blue barrels. They have girls selling cookies, sweets, drinks on a boat…i think they call that the floating market or maybe a floating 7-eleven. Everything you see is unbelievable. The next day we landed on the shores of Cat Ba Island and met up with some pretty cool blokes from Ireland. Once again, those tour guide didnt gave us any type of warning that we’ll be doing a 2 hrs hike up a mountain. I MEAN MOUNTAIN, it wasnt a hump on the ground. That puppy must have been atleast 60 story high. I dunno…all i am saying is that i havent sweat in places that i knew was sweatable. Some dude said his eye balls are sweating after i said my comment. haha. But the reward was fabulous, we got to enjoy the view from mountain top and it was amazing. Sort of reminds me of the Piedra de Penol in Colombia, but way higher and harder. The local tour guide that took us up to the top of the mountain was a really cool dude. He’s like 4’5 tall and just like a primate. He would get these flowers and throw it at us and it would stick onto our shirt. Once we got down to the bottom of the mountain, most of us just drenched ourselves with buckets of water from a water well. One girl there accidentally dropped her ‘REAL’ Versace shades into the well and our tiny monkey man just jumped in there to save the probably knock off versace shades. haha. I remembered my dad used to tell me ppl falling into a well and they die. This just just voluntarily jumped into it and dived down like a freaking fish. hilarious. We went Kayaking that afternoon and it was amazing as well. We were guided to Lagoon that needed to go thru a tiny cave like opening…it was so cool.

That night, our new friends from Ireland decided to head over to a local bar and pound down some Tiger beer. They were 40 dong for 3 jumbo sized beers ~ thats about 3US bucks. Oh man, it was such a freaking great night!. We were joking and shooting the shit for hours. Then we met up with that same girl that had dropped her shades down the well. She happened to be from Ecuador and attending school in Japan. That is so freaking awesome. I love meeting ppl like that. Me and her were just kicking it. I guess i just miss my latin touch since all i see is asians here. Anyways, might meet up with her later after our water puppet show tonite. But all in all, it was absolutely a great freaking time. Reminds me of drinking at the groves back at home with my friends.

Forgot to mentioned about one of Yen’s friend’s uncle that took us out to eat at some great places in Hanoi. He’s very smart and sociable. And we both felt very honor for him to give us a little tour of HaNoi…afterall, he was the same tour guide when Clinton came over to visit Vietnam 🙂