halong bain't: get me off this f**king boat

I'm sorry, that's hardly even a pun at all.  The truth is, our Halong Bay tour barely left me with any sense of humour.  Halong Bay is a magnificent bay about four hours North of Hanoi.  It's studded with over a thousand limestone islands that jut out of the water and straight on up.  Really the only way to see the bay is to take a tour, something we usually hate doing.  For Halong Bay though?  It was going to be totally worth our 65 bucks.

Things started off well enough: the boat was alright, the people around us were friendly enough, and we got a free water on the minibus ride there.  Things began to go downhill around the time of the promised seafood lunch.  You know how food is supposed to have flavour?  Well, apparently the staff on the Du Gong haven't heard.  Our food tasted of texture and soy oil.  Yum!  The next four meals weren't any better, either.  Ugh.

The afternoon was alright.  We wandered through an enormous cave and jumped off the roof of our boat into the water. These are good things!  We were happy enough until we finished dinner and were sitting waiting for the evening's entertainment.  Oh wait, no.  The karaoke and 'exciting games' promised by the lady who booked our tour turned out not to exist.  The twenty or so backpackers unlucky enough to be on our boat sat in the dark on the rooftop deck and watched Asia Cruise next door party.  No music, no lights, minimal fun.

I have to point out here that no one in their right mind even likes karaoke, but it's the principle of the thing.  Once you've been promised something you want it, dammit!  Especially when stupid Asia Cruise is singing their little eye-of-the-tiger hearts out a hundred metres over and you're stuck on a boat that's swaying rather disconcertingly in the breezing wind.*

Things went even more rapidly downhill from here.  We finally headed to bed, where we discovered a colony of smallish cockroach-esque creatures living in our things.  Delightful.  Then, the bloodstains.  Oh, the bloodstains.  I have never seen so many bloodstains in my entire life.  What are they thinking?!  Who in their right mind would use such horror-movie prop sheets?  Ugh.  We cranked the air conditioner and finally fell asleep, repeating the weprobablywon'tdrownweprobablywon'tdrown mantra to ourselves.

The next day it rained.  Yes, stunning limestone cliffs are still beautiful in the rain.  No, tanning on the roof of the boat is not beautiful in the rain.  The ongoing incidence of squelchily oily food completely devoid of flavour didn't help.  I know I said I wouldn't say any more about the food, but they literally fed us four slices of untoasted white bread for breakfast and one cold fried egg. Unacceptable!

Moral of the story is that organized tours are less than the best thing of my life.  Sometimes nature demands that you take them, but shit.  Don't if you don't have to.  On the other hand, we developed a whole new lexicon of boat-related inside jokes and swear words, so y'all have that to look forward to.  See you guys in.... a week?!

so young, so innocent

there are bugs in here

and the bathroom smells like a pit of hell

and my sheet may have been used as a groundsheet during a brief knife fight

for whom the du gongs

*Breezing wind was a fan in Indonesia, and as such has come to mean any barely perceptible breath of wind.