We had our morning breakfast in the hostel - complimentary one serving mainly French bread and jam & butter. Not satisfied with this simple breakfast, we walked to a nearby beef noodle stall and ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup for 15,000 dong each.
While having our breakfast, the hostel owner was pushing hard to promote their various day tours to us but we shown no interest as we preferred to travel on our own. However, we promised to stay in his hostel upon our return from Halong Bay.
As we were keen to visit Halong Bay, we checked out of the hostel this morning and took a local taxi (50,000d) to Gia Lam bus terminal ( about 2km from our hostel) for our 3 1/2 hour long distance bus trip (40,000d per ticket) to Halong Bay. This was an interesting experience for us - the local bus was old like a bone shaker making many stops along the way to pick up passengers , stopped by traffic police for reason unknown to us, taking passengers carrying live ducks on board the bus etc. So it was fun to see the country side, houses, rivers, factories on both side of the roads etc. I probably expect great changes in the country side as the country progresses over time.
At around 1.00pm , we arrived at a Bai Chay bus terminal, located about 1 km from the Halong City. There were a number of local guys & taxi drivers approaching us offering to take us to Halong Bay town center; others were trying to promote and woo us to check into their hotels. One local guy who spoke pretty good English impressed me , so we decided to follow his car to the town center. The driver took us to a down town hostel and after inspecting the hostel, we decided to put up a night here. We paid US$10 for a triple bed room - not a bad deal although the location was not that ideal as it was situated along a main road and a Y junction ! It was noisy at night and indeed I did not sleep well at night .
In the afternoon, we spent our time walking towards the boat dock area at Bai Chay as we had signed up a deal with the hostel to take on a 2 day 1 night Catba Island package tour ( US$26 per person inclusive of hostel, breakfast, lunch & dinner ) and ferrying us back to Hanoi on the following day. The junk boat was to depart tomorrow at around 10.00am. At the dock, we saw rows of tourist / junk boats , tourist arrivals at the jetty and visited the ticketing office and the disembarkation area. I noticed that it was cheaper to sign up island package tours from travel agencies in Halong city than in Hanoi ! When in Hanoi, you may like to check out the tour prices in order to strike a better bargain in Halong Bay.
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We spent the rest of the afternoon wondering around the Halong Bay beach front. As it was warm during the day, we had a cool fresh coconut drink (10,000d for 3) at the beach. The water in the beach was murky so this is not a great place to put on your bikini or Speedo wear to swim here.
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