Halong Bay- AMAZING!!!

After leaving my holiday buddy behind in a bit of a frenzy because I couldn't find my purse and lost half my stuff, but eventually it was sorted and I was picked up by the tour company to go on my tour of Halong bay.

I met my companions on board. i was the youngest but I was not going to be deterred as the rest were really friendly. There was two australian couples, a new zealander, 3 people from Chile and some Chinese people.

On the way to the boat we stopped to buy fresh Oysters for dinner while waiting for the boat. There were loads of different boats in the bay and we had to take a row boat to ours.

My cabin was quite big with a double bed and a shower and beautiful views of Halong Bay.

We didn't have long to settle in as we had lunch waiting for us. The meal was massive and had like 5 courses to it. Fresh seafood and vegetables. I was sitting on a table with two people from Singapore who were lovely. They were from India and live in Singapore but are going back to India to open a charity to help the poor in india. They then said when I get to Singapore they would give me free tickets to the zoo!!

After lunch we arrived at a beach and lookout hill which I climbed to see 360 degree views of Halong Bay:

It was incredible. Then we went to see some caves in a rowing boat:

Afterwords we relaxed on the boat until dinner. Dinner was incredible again. 5 more course of fresh seafood, fresh oysters, lots of vegetables etc. Then we relaxed more on the boat docked in Halong Bay and it turned out one of the Australian ladies was a guide leader in Sydney. What are the chances! So after chatting on deck for a while we then went to bed.

The next day we had breakfast and headed to the most magnificent caves I had ever seen.

It stretched for miles and was millions of years old.

After we had lunch and took part in a cooking class where we made spring rolls. Then made our way back towards land.

We then caught our bus back to the city where I did a little more exploring before my journey to Hong Kong:

Halong Bay was amazing and I definitely recommend you do an overnight sailing tour. The place was lovely and not too hot and quite spectacular floating in amongst the hills. I'm glad I went out of season as apparently it is packed with boats when it's busy but we hardly saw any.

I enjoyed my time in Vietnam, It was very different to the rest of Asia and had a lot of natural beautiful spots although most of them are very touristy now.