Tour rage on Halong Bay

Halong Bay, very beautiful
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Vietnam is like a huge tourist escalator but we hadn't minded this until we got to Halong Bay.  Halong Bay is famous for its beautiful scenary, karst mountains like I saw in Guilin China but this time as islands, and is a pretty popular destination in Vietnam.

We had booked a 3 day/2 night tour through our guest house in Hanoi and were really looking forward to it - one night on Cat Ba island, the largest island in Halong Bay, a night on a boat admiring the beautiful scenary, lots of kayaking and swimming.

I hate to be a whiny tourist but...

On top of the rusty tower on Cat Ba island
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On the first day we had lunch on the boat, then still feeling a bit hungry were herded into some caves which were lit up with multi coloured lights and even had a fake water fountain, very entertaining.

Cruising to Cat Ba island was lovely, passing through some fishing villages and watching the jelly fish go by, taking pictures of the islands.  Once on Cat Ba island we had a couple of hours of free time before dinner, which we used getting some food, then had a couple of drinks with people from the tour.

Sunset from the boat
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The next day our group of 6 people were dropped off at the Cat Ba national park for a trek up the largest peak on the island.  We were told to wait for our tour guide to arrive, and we waited for over an hour before we decided to buy the tickets ourselves and head off.  I'm glad we made this decision as we met up with the tour guide on the top of the mountain, complete with about 10 other people so it was much better in our smaller group of 6.  The trek was good as well, got us pretty puffed and the view was amazing.  On the top of the mountain is a ricketly rusty tower that we climbed for even better views.

What our tour was supposed to be like
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In the afternoon we had some more free time, this time spent at a cute little beach 5 minutes walk from the township, then we were back on the boat for what we hoped would be our kayaking.  As the sun started to set and no kayaking was happening we asked our tour guide about it, and he said we could go kayaking if we wanted to the next morning at 6am, if we paid 15,000 dong (about $NZ1.50, but it was the principle of the matter!).  We told him that we would be going kayaking and for free, which he relunctantly agreed to.

We were all eager to see our rooms on the boat as the other half of the tour (who had slept on the boat the night before) had horror stories of cockroaches, but the only problem we had was the fist sized hole in our toliet which got our feet wet every time we flushed the toilet.  But we had it better than some people - they had overbooked the boat so they had to sleep outside in the dew, after firstly being told that we had to share rooms with 3 people in the small 2 single bed rooms.

After a pleasant night drinking beers under the stars we had a good nights sleep, all ready for our kayaking early the next day.  The whole 20 mins of it.

We were back on land at 10.30 in time for a 1.5 hour lunch break and the 3 hour drive back to Hanoi, some pretty annoyed people.  It didn't help that we found out that other people paid $US15 less for the trip than we did, and even people who booked in our guest house paid $US10 and $US5 less.  Gutted!