Maz and Tom's Adventure
 Maz's Bday and Halong Bay Today was Maz’s birthday so we had timed it for the start of our tour of Halong Bay. We had chosen the midrange tour which meant we got better food and nicer rooms. We left early and took the 4 hour bus ride to the boat. The bay itself was beautiful – its massive and has a total of 2000 islands inside it. We started the first day by having a 2 hour trip towards some very famous caves. We arrived at the caves and had to take a smaller boat. The cave was much bigger than I had expected and had lots of rocks in the shape of different things such as a Buddha, a turtle and everyone’s favorite – a big red willy!!! The whole cave was lit up in different colors making it even more impressive than it would have already been. After this we all went to the floating houses of the locals from where we did Kayaking. This was fun, even though Maz is rubbish at Kayaking and even though I’m probably not much better I had to do most of the work! That evening we had about an hour before dinner and so a load of us went for a swim off the boat. The water was surprisingly warm and the water was much saltier than any of us had thought it would be. However, it was nice way of relaxing after a long hot day. The next day we went to Cat Ba Island which is a national park just on the outskirts of the bay. it took about 2 hours to get there but we relaxed on the sun loungers on the top floor of the boat so it was a nice trip. On arriving on the island we were taken to the start of walk up to a view point. This was a 2 hour walk and at some points was really steep and some people were really not prepared for it as the tour itinerary did not really describe it properly. At the top was a tall lookout tower which I climbed to the top of. It was actually pretty scary because the tower looked as if it had been there forever and most it was by now rusting away and not very sturdy at all. After this we had lunch and then went to Monkey Island which was a bit of a let down because most of the monkeys were asleep so we only saw about 5 or 6. We did however walk along the beach a bit which was nice. The next day we took the boat back to Halong City which was nice as we went a different route back which went closer to a lot of the islands, also the weather was nicer and had some good blue skies. At dinner we ate as much as possible because this was our last included meal and after this we would be back to noodles and fried rice.
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