Cruising along Ha Long Bay

This time I will bring you to Ha Long Bay (yeah I'm just recording my past journey). In Vietnamese, it is called Vinh Ha Long, which means the dragon bay. The scene in Ha Long Bay is very similar to Guilin (China) and Phuket (Thailand). It has this magical misty view.

During my visit there, I decided to spent the night in the boat while cruising the bay. Having heard the recent accident happened, I was cautious on choosing the cruise operator. At the end, I chose the easiest option, that is through the hotel management.

The trip was awesome. It covers all the fun activities, including walking and climbing to 2 caves, kayaking, exploring the floating village, cooking class, and jumping off the boat (this was fun), and karaoke-ing at night. I was lucky that I had a good company too. Bunch of youngsters from all over the world. Good diversity and perfect age group. 

Some tips on choosing the tour operator: just relax, it's Vietnam. You don't really need to plan everything in advance. And just pay it with USD.. cheaper and easier that way. I realized, Vietnam is very much American. USD is more worthy than the Vietnamese Dong.

Faces of Vietnam

Buzzing Hanoi

I went to Hanoi on August 2011. At the airport we were picked up our friend, Ronald. He immediately showed us the best of Vietnam. The first thing we noticed is the exciting feeling about Hanoi. It's green with paddy field on one side, and tall development on the other side. Not only that, we also came across with people carrying kettle in front of the new city development.

The architecture in Hanoi is really amazing too. The city is filled with tall narrow buildings. This is mostly because of the price of land that is rocket high. We can find a mix between colonial style architecture and Khmer architecture.

 The great and at the same time annoying thing about Hanoi is the conjunction between vehicular, motorbike and pedestrian traffic. We continuously had to encounter this excitement. It was scary at the same time. We just couldn't lost guard on where to walk and to cross the street. It was definitely an awesome experience.