More of Halong Bay

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Look how cooperative my young Vietnamese friends were. I even have a video of the girl introducing herself in my hp(3gpp format, unfortunately).

Beauties on the boat overlooking the awesome scenery. They must be wondering whether I was more interested in them than the scenery. *LoL* To justify myself, I would say both. It displays the actual scenario both on and around the boat on that day.

Wow! Seriously, I'm pround of this! Selling for postcards printing, anyone?

Mystical, isn't it? We entered this secluded area and stayed for the night. Here's where we swam as well.

It turned out that we had gotten ourselves stalkers that night. No worries, that's just our neighbours. We happily chatted away under the starry starry night at the top deck though only having met that morning.

As mentioned in my previous post, I spent my night at the top deck. Thus, I had the opportunity to capture this shot the instant dawn broke at 5.15 am.

Things I enjoyed from this tour:-

1) The awesome scenery, of course!

2) The people I came to know - Kiwis, Vietnamese, Austrians, Neatherlanders, Japanese and my New Yorker room mate.

3) The satisfaction of being able to practise my Deutsch and Nihongo at the same time.

4) The credits I got for my fluency in both was definitely a bonus! However, my reply was "Iie, ma ma desu" and "Nein, nicht gut, so la-la".

Things I would prefer it to improve:-

1) The food quality served. It was very plain dishes of stir fried veggies and plain fried fish.

2) Water was sold and not included throughout our 2D/1N stay on the boat. A can of coke for example was sold at USD 1 and a bottle of 500ml drinking water for VND 5000. To me, Malaysian standard... OK-la, but this price in Vietnam, pricey! You're confused with the currencies? That's exactly how confused I was during the trip having to interpret and justify the price in MYR as well(3 currencies involved). These Vietnamese prefer to quote in USD so as they can come out with their own exchange rate if we opted to pay in VND. I can still remember the expression on the seller's face when she calculated her earnings for that day.

3) The bad service of my tour guide and bus driver needs improvement! Having dropped others safely at the hostels, we(me and roomie) were left stranded on the street. I supposed he's not happy with our ratings on the feedback form. Fortunately, I had known my way a lil better from my streets wandering earlier.

4) The typical case with group tours where more time's wasted in unfathomable waiting instead of activities listed in the itinery.