Halong Bay and Hanoi Water Puppets

The breakfast buffet was really lacking in food I liked this morning. I long for my oatmeal squares. It seems like the thing to eat is noodle soup and salad for breakfast. I just wanted some good cereal. I ended up eating a lot of French bread for breakfast. Everywhere I go in Vietnam I'm called Madame. I think it's the French influence. Strangely enough though, Ben is not called Monsieur. Anyway, we were met by our guide and taken to the dock to get on a boat. We had the boat to ourselves along with the guide and the crew. It was actually nice to be the only ones on there. We went on a 5 hour tour of Halong Bay. Unfortunately it was still pretty hazy, but once you got close to the islands, you could see them well. Halong Bay has over 3,000 islands. The water is an emerald green, which is hard to tell in the pictures, but it really was a pretty green. The bay is protected by UNESCO and are up for one of the new 7 natural wonders of the world. You were encouraged to go online and vote for Halong Bay by posters all over the place. Being in the bay was a nice change from Hanoi. I think this was when I started to warm up to Vietnam. Our first stop was at "No War" island. Besides the million tourists that were on the island with us, there were two limestone caves. The first cave we saw (the more popular one) was the more recently discovered cave. The story is that a fisherman was near the island when he saw a monkey on the island. The fisherman tried to catch the monkey, but the monkey disappeared. Eventually he discovered a hole in the mountain which led down into the cave and that was where the monkey was. The second cave was bigger than the first and looked older. After the caves we got back on the boat and cruised for the rest of the time. We did stop at one fisherman's house to look at the fresh seafood, but it was only to look. We passed a couple of fishing villages on the water and I was really surprised to see that a lot of people had dogs. It doesn't really seem to make sense to me, but I guess it worked for them. Except for when we ate lunch, Ben and I stayed on the top of the boat so we could see everything that we passed. Lunch was interesting. I am not a huge seafood person, so I was a little scared about what we were going to get. It was ok. We had shrimp (ok, Ben ate these - they still had heads, feet, veins, everything on them - yuck), squid (I tried it, but really Ben at it), some kind of white fish, fried crab (this wasn't too bad), rice and veggies. It's a good thing I like rice, otherwise I wouldn't survive in Asia. Shortly after lunch we were at the dock again. We got back into the car and headed back to Hanoi for the night. Once we hit Hanoi, the roads were crowded, mostly with motorbikes. Sometimes there were up to 4 people on one motorbike. A toddler in front, the dad, a baby smashed in the middle and the mom. Kind of crazy and it seems unsafe, but they seemed fine with it. Oh yeah, and they are required to wear helmets. It was a new law in September and if they don't I think they get their motorbike taken away for some amount of time. A lot of people die everyday in Vietnam (maybe 30 or so) in vehicle/motorbike accidents. Kind of scary. I think we only saw one accident the whole time we were in Vietnam which was surprising since the driving is crazy. We spent a few minutes in the Don Xuan market. Ben equated it to a large crazy flea market. We then checked in to the hotel and went to the Water Puppet Show. The place was packed and it was actually really cool and entertaining. It is one of my favorite memories from the time in Vietnam. There were 16-17 short stories told by the water puppets. My favorite was the Phoenix dance and Ben liked the dragons shooting fireworks and water out of their mouths. If you ever go to Hanoi, you must go see this show. We then went to a restaurant where you could have a hot pot meal. Basically you started off with some kind of chicken stock (we both had chicken with jasmine) and that came in a pot that you cover and put over a flame and get it to boil. Then there was a buffet with raw meat, veggies, fruit, noodle and other things you could put in the soup to cook it. I avoided the meat and stuck with the veggies and noodles. The stock didn't have a whole lot of flavor and it was ok, but not great.