we decided against trying to cram in as many things as possible into two weeks at a frantic pace. instead, we spent a day and a half walking around hanoi and the lovely lake in the middle. we visited the ho chi minh museum and the temple of literature, and saw a water puppet performance. on our third day, we joined a two day tour to ha long bay. a four hour bus ride from hanoi, ha long bay is filled w/ beautiful rock formations. (over 3000 islands!) at thin's recommendation, we opted to sleep on the boat in the bay, rather than a hotel on one of the islands. we boarded the boat by mid-day, sailed out a bit and stopped for a seafood lunch. the scenery is really dramatic! the rock formations rise straight up out of the sea as far as the eye can see. after lunch, we got our room keys & dropped our overnight bags below deck. that's when we realized the place was absolutely crawling with roaches! and i do mean crawling...in broad daylight, they were marching across the ceiling, walls, floor, and even out from between the bed sheets! at dinner (which was served w/out a tablecloth) we could see roaches crawling around between the wicker table and the glass top!!! talk about grossed out! and with nowhere to go! sleeping below deck was out of the question for us...even with the drawstring on my sleep sack, i am not that hard core! we'd struck up a friendship w/ claire and shane from britian, and almost convinced them to camp with us on the top deck under the stars (claire was equally disgusted)...no one else seemed alarmed. it turned out to be quite nice actually, sleeping up top. the deck loungers were comfortable, and the clouds cleared away so we could watch the stars & the twinkling lights from the other boats in the bay! quite romantic, until a cold wind rolled in around 3 am...going below deck in the pitch darkness was also out of the question, so we just snuggled up & tried to keep each other warm until morning. jokes! the sunrise was beautiful over the mountains! if it hadn't been for our pesky cabin mates, we'd have missed it! we spent a couple more relaxing hours motoring around the bay & headed back to hanoi.
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