One last day of exploring the North… let’s make it count.
Today, we were going to Ha Long Bay itself, taking a boat cruise out to see all the islands in the area. If you’ve never heard of Ha Long Bay, you’ve definitely seen some of the pictures that come with it: these stone islands covered in flora, creating this look of an endless ocean with a bunch of green lumps sticking out. It’s crazy to see, and it’s no surprise that the whole place is UNESCO material. These islands seemed to go on forever. We ended up exploring only a small part of the endless islands, but there were certainly a LOT more than what we could see. Looking at the map, the islands go out for miles, and I’m 99% certain we missed Cat Ba Island, the biggest of the bunch.
After waking up, getting breakfast at the lounge, and meeting up with Mia and Koia and our driver at the car, we all immediately went to this sea port where we could go on a cruise around all of the ocean. The sea port consisted of a large building, and we found that there was another group of ladies in pink shirts waiting for their own boat to arrive (Although I don’t think this group of ladies was part of the pink team from earlier, maybe it was, not sure). Before Casey could approach them and ask where he could cop their awesome shirts, however, everyone dragged Casey to the boat and we all got on and prepared for the cruise around the islands. While inside and waiting for the cruise to start, Mia and I took a bunch of music-related online quizzes (figuring out what the song was based on its notation, things like that) and I have no idea what Casey was up to. When the ship began to move, all of us looked out onto the bay.
The place was filled with all these different rock formations that stood out to you in all directions, each one filled with vegetation. You don’t see this kind of thing everywhere- it goes on and on and apparently we didn’t see enough of it, because we stayed close and clung to the actual bay for a good percentage of the time. Many of the islands also had really good beaches, but we didn’t ever get to go on one since it wasn’t allowed and nobody had really brought out clothes for us to change into.
Most of the islands were visited were just passed by, but there were also a few places that we actually set foot onto. These included the bigger islands which made massive and dark caves inside. You have to watch your step in here. There’s tons of lighting around the cave, but the cave is so incredibly big that it can be hard in some places to watch your step. There was very little vegetation inside these caves, which was an interesting and very sharp contrast to the outside of the island, which was filled with life. The only parts of the cave that had some organisms were the areas close enough to the lights to grow plants- which looked a lot like it could be a terrarium.
The main downside to this was the fact that the oceans were very polluted- everywhere was filled with these plastic bottles and bags that you couldn’t go two hundred feet without seeing. Hopefully the government figures this out soon.
We came back around noon and began discussing where we wanted to go next. It was ultimately decided that we should go on a hike in the mountains inland since that area offered some great views. The mountains were a bit far inland, so to get there we’d need a really long car drive, about an hour or so out of the Ha Long Province (I think it was outside of the Ha Long province) and into a nearby province (probably Haiphong) which took a long time, but also offered us more of a look into the cities and towns in this area. When we arrived, we took a few of these smaller cart rides to reach a restaurant, where we ate some food before heading out again to go hiking. Just like Fansipan, we were all lazy and took a few more cable cars, but we did do some of the walking ourselves down the paths and up this extremely steep staircase.
As we were walking up the extremely steep stair case, Mia suddenly got ambushed by a cat and of course we all ran to pet it, but the cat was really interested in eating everyone’s shoes for some reason. After a while, it kind of started to lose its sanity so we left it alone and continued. I really should have taken pictures of the view, but I didn’t, although I do recall seeing some very exotic creatures as well as another cat.
After some more hiking, we decided to go back to our hotel and chill there for the rest of the night. I don’t remember everything we did that day afterwards (it’s been 13 months now lol, JP2024 coming soon tho) except for a contest between Koia and Casey as to who could make weirder noises (Koia made anime noises, Casey started moaning)
And with that, our last day of real traveling comes to an end. There will be one more finale part to this VN2023 series, but the traveling part is over. This took way too long to write…