Halong Bay, Vietnam

We ended up booking our 3 day, 2 night, tour to Halong Bay through the Ritz Hotel in Hanoi.  The tour company was called vietnamopentour.com.  Overall, it was a great trip!  We would have enjoyed it even more if they had served better food, though.  The tour cost $95/person and included a night on a Junk Boat, a night at Holiday View Hotel on Cat Ba Island, and meals (not including drinks).  The boat could have fit 16 people, but there were only about 12 of us, and only 7 of us stayed for the third day of the tour, since some people on the boat had only booked the 2 day tour.

Halong Bay is similar to Phan Nga and Krabi provinces in Thailand, but even more beautiful.  Our visit to “Surprise Cave” was a pleasant surprise, since we hadn’t realized that was on the itinerary and it was a huge cave with very interesting formations and ceiling.

My favorite part was being on the Junk Boat!  You could sit up top and gaze at the scenery, and even from our room on the second floor at the back of the boat we had a great view, with two windows, one facing the back and one facing the side.  It was a good group of people on the trip, which was another plus.

Inside many of these limestone karsts exist little bays with calm blue waters and an abundance of wildlife.  We were fortunate to see a group of about 10 monkeys nears the shore of one of these karst and we are pretty certain that we saw the endangered langoors.

Our guide said there used to be many more fishing villages with fish farms, but over farming and pollution has reduced this number greatly.

Many little ‘floating markets’ – ladies in boats trying to sell beer, soda, water, candy and other goods to tourists on the junk boats.  One of our fellow tour mates bought some beer from them and our boat staff was not very happy about it.  They told him that the floating markets are bad and we shouldn’t encourage them, but we think that they were upset because we were not giving business to our boat.

Our tour guide, Phu, was nice, but he wasn’t much of a guide.  Other guides were stopping and pointing out formations during the cave visit, but our guide just walked off without us.  He really only informed us of what was next on the itinerary, but didn’t really give us info on the places we visited.

There are options to kayak or bike through the islands.  Our group voted to bike and the photo above was taken on our bike ride through the park on Cat Ba Island.

Plenty of beautiful scenery on the islands throughout Halong Bay.  Any trip to Vietnam should include a stop here at the UNESCO world heritage site!  We recommend that you take the 3 day 2 night tour where you spend a night on the junk boat and one night on Cat Ba Island.