Jo's Travels

We were picked up at our hotel by our guide (still not sure what his name was but we called him Pete). So he took us to the train station and when the conductor starting yelling at him we realised there was a problem..the tickets for foreigners cost more and are different, so we held up the train for a little bit.

The 3 hour train ride on the wooden bench seats on a rickety old train with people smoking all around us wasn't too bad, and glad when we eventually arrived in Haiphong. We were picked up by cyclos, suitcase and all we were transferred to our hotel which was really nice for a change.

The following day we were taken to the 'hydrofoil' (something which looked left over from the war), and off to Cat Ba Island where we jumped on the back of motorbikes and taken to the other side of the island for our boat cruise. We were the only tourists on this beautiful old wooden boat and sat up on the open deck with a bottle of wine and enjoyed hours of cruising around Halong Bay admiring its over 3000 beautiful limestone islands, and green water. The were little villages everywhere of tiny houses floating on water. We stopped only once to visit what was a secret cave, which was a small hole in one of the limestone islands. We were then cooked a huge seafood feast, this was definately the highlight of our trip to Vietnam.

The following day we set off on a bicycle ride through the countryside of Haiphong. We passed through villages of rice paddies and other farms. We spent most of time replying 'hello' as the locals seemed as if they hadn't seen too many westeners, but they were very friendly and we got a lot of pointing and laughters, greetings and a few 'Bonjours!'. The women here work so hard!! It really is equal opportunity in Vietnam, we've seen women unloading truck loads of bricks, cementing, farming, you name it, if a man is doing a labourous job there'll be a woman doing the same thing.