Well you know what?? The boat trip was actually pretty freaking awesome!! Halong Bay is absolutely gorgeous. On top of that, our boat was like a five-star resort (in miniature form), and the people on our boat were pretty fun – all these things made it an excellent trip to see one of the most beautiful places in the world.

 

 

 
This was our boat, docked in Halong Bay

 

We saw the sun set over Halong Bay on the first night, and then we all sat around playing cards inside the cabin since it was far too cold to sit on the deck. 

 

The next day, we docked at Cat Ba, and we went trekking up some mountain. On the way back, Amy and I and some other people accidentally took the wrong path down, and we thought we might get lost on Cat Ba and end up having to eat each other in some kind of crazy adventure tale where I would later be played in a movie by Uma Thurman (of course)…but that didn’t happen because it met up with the trail we were meant to take.

 

 
We were pretty excited about having climbed a mountain

That night, we stayed in our hotel and drank wine that we snuck in from next door (since our hotel owner asked us not to bring booze in from outside, and instead pay for his alcohol which was double the price…silly man didn’t realize who he was dealing with). We all hung out in one room and drank wine bottle after wine bottle and listened to this band called “Machine Gun Fellatio” who are Aussie.

The next morning we had to check out, and take a long boat/bus ride back to Hanoi. Amy and I had made plans to meet up with Ann-Marie, who is a hilarious woman we met on our Indonesian boat trip back in July. She lives in Hanoi and teaches drama at an international school.

We had dinner with Ann-Marie, and then the three of us went to Le Pub, which is a neat place to hang out and always filled with travelers. We ended up meeting this group of really cool Dutchies, who teach English a few hours outside of Hanoi. Since it was my 25th birthday at midnight (officially), they ended up MAKING me go out with them afterwards to a few different bars and clubs. It was a really good time.

Then yesterday was my real birthday – the big 2-5. Weeee!! Amy and I shopped all day, had ice-cream for lunch, and then met Ann-Marie for dinner …we went to a Mexican restaurant so I could have my favourite meal – NACHOS!!!

 

 
Me with my nachos, my favourite travel buddy, and funny Ann-Marie

After that, it was back to Le Pub, where we ended up meeting up with a new group of peeps from Oz, and England, and a few of our Dutch and French friends from the boat cruise came as well. We had a blast.

 

 
The Xs are to represent the group's lack of STDs!! It's a long story (not really at all)

We hit up a neat club called Solace after that, where we danced our faces off. It was a freaking fantastic birthday. What what.

 

About Hanoi - I actually REALLY like Hanoi. It is a bit cold - it's colder than we thought actually - the past few days it went down to 12-15. But it's a nice change to not be sweating all the time. We've had quite a few encounters with some very rude Vietnamese people, but we've realized that this is likely leftover grudges from the war towards foreigners...which I guess is fair enough (not really). It's "Hanoi"-ing, as the Dutch people put it. But we've also met some really lovely locals as well, so I'm not trying to generalize here.

 

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