cinema | The Snow Adventures

We left the chaos of Hanoi for a two day / one night boat trip around the beautiful Ha Long Bay. It took three and a half hours on a coach to get there but it was well worth it. Once at the bay we were ushered onto an impressive boat (Viola cruises). We chuckled as it took two Vietnamese crew members to lift one of our cases (yes I think we did over pack after all!), as a result we had a room on the lower deck!

Ha Long Bay is made up of two thousand forest covered islands appearing sporadically from the emerald waters. Ha Long translates as ‘where the dragon descends into the sea’ and the legend claims that the islands were created by a great dragon from the mountains.

The boat trip allowed us to do a tour of the islands and even explore one of largest caves in the bay (Sung Sot cave or Surprising cave as our guide kept calling it). On day two we shared a double canoe to explore one of the floating villages. Dean would claim that he did all the work and I just pointed to the direction we should go in (this was clearly not the case!) It’s always amazing to see how these people survive and we were informed that they sell fish back to the mainland in exchange for key supplies.

Back on the boat we had a cooking lesson on how to make flowers out of vegetables, it was impressive but please don’t expect this at ours for dinner! We also learnt how to make the infamous Vietnamese spring rolls. It was incredibly easy, even I managed it! Rice paper, sliced cucumber, carrot, rice noodles and shredded meat (no idea what it was, but it tasted good!) rolled together then dipped in fish sauce.

The coach then dropped us to a hotel we had booked in Ha Long called Royal Lotus and we were relieved it was so nice as there is NOTHING to do there! Most people just do the boat trip around the bay then head back to Hanoi, but one was not aware of this at the time of booking!!! Basically it’s a ghost town built for tourists but it’s not finished and we can’t figure out if that’s because there aren’t any tourists or they have just given up! Anyway we managed to spend a few days relaxing and even went to the abandoned cinema to see Bond and the latest Hunger Games film (it was subtitled and yes we were the only people in there!)