Ha Long Bay

The famous Ha Long Bay!

Ok so the night we got back from the Ha Giang Loop, I left my phone on the big bus that took us to Hanoi that night. That bus dropped us about a half an hour away from our hotel, and we took a smaller bus into the city because the roads are small in Hanoi. I only noticed it was missing right when we were about to get off the small bus so we asked the small bus driver who didn’t speak any English what to do and he just gave us a phone number.

We just went back to the hostel and asked the person working at reception if they could help. He just was very calm and said “I will call them, and when I have the phone in my hands I will come upstairs to your room, you can just go relax”

Later that night he came upstairs and told us that when the driver wakes up in the morning, they’ll deliver the phone and we’ll just have to pay the driver basically $5.

Sure enough, the next morning a motorcycle driver came by with my phone at 7:30 just in time to get it charged up for our 8:30 bus to ha long bay!

The bus ride is about 2 hours from Hanoi, and we stopped at a pearl farm on the way. They showed us how they farm pearls and then tried to sell us some jewelry.

After that we were at the harbour fairly quickly, waiting for our boat.

We got on our boat around noon, had lunch pretty much immediately while we exited the harbour and went into the mountainous bay area.

After lunch we went up to the rooftop to relax a little before we got to the cave - the biggest cave in ha long bay. It was really crowded with tourists but it was a massive cave, like as if the whole island had been hollowed out.

After that we headed back to the boat, relaxed a little again and then we went to a little island with a beach and a little hike up to a view point. We did the hike and then went for a quick swim around sunset!

Then it was back to the boat roof to watch the sunset and have a drink. After the sunset, we got dinner again, sat with an older French couple Jane (and to a lesser extent, I) got to speak a bit of French & we got a nice big meal again.

After dinner there was a “squid fishing activity” which was mostly just holding a fishing rod in the water. The guide pretty much told us upfront we weren’t going to catch anything.

We went to sleep fairly early that night to get up for the sunrise the next morning! We watched the sunrise, had a quick, early breakfast and then they took us to go for a little kayak.

Then we went back to the harbour and had a final lunch on the boat.

The bus back to Hanoi took another couple hours and we were back there by about 6:30. We left our bags with the hostel we had some really good bbq skewers in Hanoi, and then went to the train station that night for our sleeper train to Sapa.

Even though it was crowded and touristy, this was an absolutely stunning cruise!Read more