Vietnam is the country of tours. The Ministry of Tourism is very well established. They have more travel agencies than hotels as every hotel is also a travel agency!
We paid $40us each for a 3 day 2 night tour to Halong Bay and met others on the tour who paid $80us each for 1 day and 1 night! They were not happy to find they had been ripped off! The Vietnamese are very good at finding extra charges!
The boat was a battered old thing and did not have sails like the pictures they show you have. There were 14 people on each boat and we were lucky enough to have good weather. The guide was a grumpy guy as 4 people walked off the tour because they had paid for a deluxe tour and it certainly was not that. You are told that the different prices are because of the different classes of hotels or type of food you eat but we paid different prices for the same thing!
We had one night on the boat and in the night Lil was woken by a rustling noise in the room and when she got out of bed she nearly stepped on a large white rat that had been munching on the bag of muesli in her backpack! Vietnamese rats are bigger than Vietnamese cats because they are fed better!
It was very pleasant sailing through the karst rock formations in the bay. We stopped at a limestone cave and managed to get in some kayaking before the sun set.
The next morning we set out on a trek through the Cat Ba National park with a guide and 2 Canadians. We saw an animal that looked like the endangered Cat Ba Langur: a monkey.
We stayed in a hotel on Cat Ba Island and did some more kayaking around the islands. We paid extra and stayed a couple more nights to relax before joining the tour and returning back to Hanoi.
Around Halong Bay are many factories and a coal mining area so the air was very smoggy which was a shame!
