Buoy, are these views seriously fin-tastic
8th February 2020
We know it’s been a little while since we wrote that we did anything of note, but that’s very much because we didn’t!
Since the 3rd of February the schools in Hai Phong and Vietnam in general have been closed due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Many of you must think (like we did) wooo a week off work.
Which lasted, for approximately, two days before we figured that there is literally nothing to do in Hai Phong apart from eat and get smashed.
After doing both these things for a couple of days we needed abit more fulfillment, after all we had come to Vietnam to see the wonderful place it is.
Unfortunately our employers were concerned that if we left to see Vietnam we may get stuck wherever we ended up, but by the end of the week we’d gone abit crazy so a trip to Hạ Long Bay was very much needed. Plus it looked super cool!!
And with it only being about a 40 minute drive away we ran out of reasons not to go.
The insanely cheap taxi prices meant that we got all the way to an island in Hạ Long Bay called Tuần Châu, (which we decided was our best port of call) for only around £3 per person.
When we first arrived we decided to eat, because yano we haven’t been doing enough of that in Hai Phong, but being the westerners we are when a menu is put infront of you that shows pizza you get insanely tempted,
This was the worst pizza I have ever eaten 😭
(yes we still ate it because its still pizza after all)
The guy, who told us his name was Tony, (because his uncle is Tony Blair!) let us order it then walked to the local take away pizza place, bought a pizza, strolled back and delivered a cold pizza to us, then when we asked where the second one was proceeded to do the same.
Side note apparently the Western thing of eating an entire pizza to yourself gets you weird looks in this country!
Tony then dragged us off to meet his sister who owned a boat,
Now this was what we were here for, fully set on having a boat trip we definitely got ripped off but we still somehow booked an entire tour boat for over 50 people between the seven of us
Overall it cost us about £22 each, but for Vietnam that’s alot!
Once out on the high seas, or the bay, we were all quite excited to see what Vietnam had in store for our day as tourists
First thing first was some spectacular caves
We’ve never seen anything quite like this place, it was such an eerie experience because the rest of the year they would be so full and busy and we were stood in a cave completely alone.
Once we had seen as many caves as we could find it was back to the nice man on the boat and heading back out into the bay.
Our boat man was absolutely lovely but had literally no English so was just doing alot of gesturing to us.
Which we were reciprocating.
His next idea was that we would go on a kayak, which in February none of us were wild about doing.
But when a grown man is pretending to be in a kayak and you say no then he pulls the boat up to a floating board with kayaks on you kind of don’t have a choice.
So we went kayaking!
Which to be fair, was the best decision ‘we’ made.
May let random vietnamese people make all our travel plans in the future!
We got absolutely soaked but had a nice paddle round a beautiful place.
We did this for a reasonable amount of time considering it had only cost us 40,000vnd, about £1.
We headed back to the big boat and were off on our travels again.
But now with wet backsides.
Next on the crazy boat drivers touristy list was the kissing chicken.
Which interestingly enough is the picture on the 200,000vnd note (if you happen to have one of those on you and want to see what a kissing chicken looks like)
If not this is it in real life.
After our trip to the chicken we were headed back for shore, but because we were a decent distance out that meant a nice chilled boat ride.
We both thought it might be nice to facetime home and show how lovely it was here and be abit smug.
However, pretty much the only comment my parents made were ‘ohh hasn’t your 4g got a bad signal there’ I mean we’re in the middle of the sea but sure.
Back on dry land, we decided there wasn’t too much open in Hạ Long in February so we headed back to Hai Phong.
Which meant only one thing…
Phở time
Now over the past few weeks Dan has become very fond of Phở
It’s the traditional dish of Vietnam and is basically noodle broth but with beef or chicken it’s really goooood!
One happy Dan!
And for all the uncertainty in our lives right now this day has done us all wonders, reminding us why we came and how beautiful the place we in live is.
B
Beth and Dan go to Vietnam 