Halong Bay meet Team Mental Midgets

It takes about 5 hours to drive from Hanoi to Halong Bay with one stop to pee in a hole and grab a popsicle. You could shop at this stop to buy some trinket or an entire painting or maybe some mung bean candy. But when you are hungover, a popsicle or 12 would be nice. The hole to pee in and whatever you may have to do, well, that's just nasty. In Nam, the rest stops have normal toilets if you are lucky, otherwise you are dealing with a hole, a large bucket of water, and a plastic pale to scoop that water into your hole to 'flush'. Even worse are the rest stops that only have 1 of those hole stalls, the rest are only for #1 and you have to basically pee on the ground and wash it aside. Lesson learned quickly, bring your own wipes and get ready for squatting. Anyway...

Getting to your Junk boat is like a bad audition. Everyone is waiting in some un-uniformed line trying to get in and are nervous about what boat they are about to embark on. Thankfully, we had my Momz. She knows how to make sure we are being sought after. Even so, we had to wait about 30 minutes to get ushered through the gate and on to the skinny path to our boat. As we passed the junky Junks, we were pleasantly surprised to see our boat have real plants, a nice mini deck, and a wet towelette for our arrival. The girl that was passing out the individual towelettes became my Momz new project. Get her married to Tony.

After 2 days, my Momz was unsuccessful in having a shotgun wedding on the Junk. Although we did capture some touching moments with the girl and Tony talking in the breeze on the deck. Damn you Ding Dong get those photos up!!!

Without Dinger's photo loading handy work, I don't have much to show you. Except these of us... you can kind of see the background... kind of.


While cruising on the Junk you pass some junk in the water, from plastic bags to someone's red purse. The sails are for show, and the boat runs on gas. There are about 50 Junks out there at once... I wasn't really counting...All the boats have to follow a similar path to 'preserve' the natural surroundings. Even so, I saw 1 bird, just one. Oh and a rat, I definitely saw a rat on one of the islands, the one with a little beach (which you have to pay to access) and a pagoda on top of it's peak. Dinger, Tony, and I climbed to the top in the sweltering humidity. The view was amazing, but it was also where I saw the rat.

Prior to the beach we hiked through the Luray Caverns of Halong Bay. Which is enormous. I was picturing an invisible piano played by Rowan Atkinson sans all the other tourists. Our tour guide's English was good, much better than any of my second languages (yes, I have more than 1 second language). His English and history just wasn't good enough to listen to though. So I tried to run astray, he would catch up to me, so I gave in and listened, "here you have a turtle! the stone make a turtle. this is good luck. throw money and rub head."

Don't ask.

That night on the Junk was epic. Our boat didn't have enough bedrooms for all of the guests, which meant that Tony had to stay on another boat. Which really meant we had, not just one, but TWO extra boats to play with. Fun! Both were named White Dolphin, and both were luxurious. The newest one, featured in the said link, was celebrating it's first night on the Bay. That meant free Remy's on ice for Tony (and us if we wanted them) and for us to chill in the super yummy top deck while listening to the owner and crew party it up karaoke style downstairs. Finally, no honking, no moving, no bad history, and no match-making for Tony.

The owner of the White Dolphin is some lead in the Communist regime. It showed. He eventually kicked us out of his party after playing the drink, don't drink with me game. I could tell he didn't like the look of me or the fact that I squint without speaking Vietnamese. He said something strange to Tony too like, "I would talk to you but you don't understand me." Tony replied in Vietnamese, "I can understand everything you say, just talk to me directly."

Drama. The Cong are still strong about cultural purification. The whole country is filled with pure Vietnamese, that is Chinese now Vietnamese. I'm not trying to even go there...

In the morning, ladies on row boats filled with wet, dried, wet, and redried junk food products for you to purchase. They try to rape you on the prices, since you are on a boat in the Bay. We lucked out with our boat's cuisine. The meals were tasty with a variety of seafood for each meal. Yum.

Once we landed we were heading back to Hanoi, and this time we are in a 5 star hotel. Proper. The Hanoi Sheraton is where we said, "Goodbye!" to Dinger and Cakes after a long hot shower. We missed them instantly. I drew them on the bar's pool sign up board to have them with us still.

In my drawing, Dinger has his camera around his neck and Cakes has the Mental Midget necklace around hers. She was the ultimate Mental Midget on the team and wore it most of the cruise. Wonder why? Here's a good video for reference:

Next day was Saigon, where I was born.