Our hotel in Halong Bay .. quite nice overall .. pity about the lack of other tourists about though!
Well today was the day we finally got to leave the ghost town of
Halong Bay. It really has been a disappointment
overall. It probably is a lovely area when the sun is shining and there are
loads of people around, but for our experience over Christmas time, it really
has been quite disappointing.
Anyway our bus back to Hanoi
picked us up at the hotel just after 12:30 and we done a few more pickups
around Halong Bay before we left. The scenery on the
way back was quite beautiful again, probably even better than Halong Bay
ityself as there seemed to be more diversity and a hell of a lot more people
around the streets as we drove through.
We arrived back into Hanoi about 4 o clock in a
slightly different part of the old quarter.
Locals building a dyke to move water into the new rice fields
We were droped off beside the Hoan Kiem
Lake. We were back to the
hustle and bustle of Hanoi
again, people everywhere, the drone of car and motorbike horns and the general
lack of order on the roads.
We found an hotel to stay in, dropped off our stuff and went for
a walk along the market streets. This experience of Hanoi was much different to our last
experience. There were restaurants everywhere, loads of markets with foreigners
bargaining for the best deal. We grabbed something to eat in a combined tourist
office, internet café, bar and restaurant, and it was quite nice. We took
another wander around the stalls, where we didn't really see anything we liked
so we headed back to the hotel and chilled out before going off to sleep ... dreaming of the hope that New Years will be better wherever we end up!
