We were told our bus pick-up is at 7.30am local time and breakfast will be ready by 6.30am. But unfortunately we had to wait 15-20minutes. It was small serving and we picked "Australian breakfast" as it comes with bacon and sausage.
After breakfast, we had to wait for 15minutes for our bus that goes around the whole Hanoi town to pick-up other people until the bus is full. Journey to Halong harbour is 3 hours. We stopped at a marble-sculpture-factory for toilet-break. This really helped me to 'fix' my aching-soaring buttock. Had naps along the rest of the trip because bus can only go maximum 50km/hour and the roads are rather bumping at some smaller towns we passes by. Along the journey from Hanoi to Halong Bay pier, I noticed lots of tombstone in the middle of the paddy-field or a village; which is an open-field.
At the harbour/jetty, we bumped into the two Filipino men we met at the airport-bus whom are going for 1-day trip to Halong Bay. Feeling hungry while waiting for our boat ride, luckily I still have some leftover bread from Malaysia. First impression of the jetty and bay wasn't so great. We first had to take a motor-driven boat to our Cruise-boat and on the Cruise-boat, we were welcomed with cold towel and it was so refreshing!
Our room is ok but the toilet has a lot of small cockroaches and the lights are very deem thus difficult to see much inside. The windows cannot open unfortunately. The aircond won't be able to function until evening due to the generator is being used to generate power for the Cruise-boat to move along the bay. After putting our 1-day-bag, we meet the rest of them at the dining area and had lunch while enjoying the bay-breeze while it sails.
After lunch, we visit Hang Đầu Gỗ (Wooden stakes cave). Good and we took lots of pictures here.
Kayaking followed after caving and it's Yen Lin's first time on a kayak. For the first 30minutes, we stay at the inner-side of the village and nearer to the cliffs as there are alot of big boats at the outer side of the village. When it's almost time, we tried to go out and was purposely knocked by one of the motor-driven boat that passes by. So scary as I can't swim in open-sea!!
We returned to the cruise-boat for those of us that want to change into swimwears. Nothing impressive of the beach at Đảo Ti Tốp (TiTop Island). We did a 30minutes stairs-climbing upwards to the peak for this small island but it felt like a longer-exhausting climb of 1hour! I need to stop many times along the way to catch-my-breath. The view can consider breath-taking especially with a panaromic camera shot taken and that's when I realised why it's a UNESCO World Heritage site. You got to be up here to "know why".
Sadly, we can't see sunset from our cruise as it's parked rather inner of a cove and it's view is blocked. We had red wine before dinner and I slowly sipped mine at the upper-deck while watching the sunset-orange-rays slowly dissapears into the horizon. The breeze was simply lovely too. Some smaller-rowed-boats returned to their village.
After dinner, I went back to our room for a shower so I can enjoy my complimentary foot massage. Gosh! Showering is a bad experience onboard this cruise! Water is so so hot that it can boil my skin! So, I end-up scooping water from the basin and bidet to wash myself. Lucky, it's not my wash-hair day. 10 minutes of foot massage was simply blissful to get rid of our soars from the climbing. After that, we had a boring experience trying to catch squid wifh a bamboo-stick and it comes along with a neon green-colour artificial miniature octopus as bait. We spend 1 hour and decided to leave it to get our beauty sleep.
No TV in the room and AC was a little weird. At night, felt 2 times some creature crawling on my exposed foot so decided to get into the covers. Gggrrrr... Very hard bed and didn't had a good rest after all.
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