Adventures

Day 10/11 - Halong Bay & Bai Tu Long Bay

Like many other people, we were unsure what would be the best way for us to actually explore Halong Bay. The absolute standard thing to do is to book a "Junk Tour" on a boat, either one, two or three days on the water and overnight stays in a cabin on the boat overnight. We had read good and bad things about those tours and even about Halong Bay itself. Supposedly the Bay was overcrowded with tourists and partly very dirty and full of trash, so at some point we even wondered if we should go at all. In the end we decided to book a junk tour anyways, because we wanted to do some special things while on holiday. To get around the overcrowded and trashy parts, we booked a tour that went to Bai Tu Long Bay, a part of Halong Bay that is further out and less crowded than the main regions.

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Day 9 - Trang An & Hang Mua

First of all: We have a LOT more pictures of the fantastic landscape we saw that day than I could possibly fit into this post, so go check out the corresponding photo set "Trang An & Hang Mua"!

In the Ninh Binh Region the main attractions are boat rides on rivers than run through the rice fields, along the limestone mountains, and sometimes even below through the many, many grottos in the limestone. We didn't have time to go and do all of them, even though they are supposed to be very different. We had read that the Trang An Area was usually a bit less crowded than the Tam Coc Boat ride, and that it led through more and smaller grottos. The main difference is, that in Trang An, the river is wedged in between limestone mountains, while for Tam Coc, the river runs through wider valleys and rice fields.

By the way, the whole Trang An - Tam Coc - Bich Dong Region is actually a UNESCO World Nature Heritage Site and a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site - the only place in Vietnam that got both of these titles.

So we once again rented a motorbike, got on it and drove to Trang An. At the tour complex we paid our fare of 200.000 Dong each and were directed to a boat together with two young vietnamese women. Our rower was a middle-aged woman with a very friendly smile, but no knowledge of english. The two vietnamese girls in our boat translated for us whenever necessary. There are two routes through you can take though the grottos, a shorter and a longer one. We had asked to be taken on the longer one, but I am not entirely convinced that it was what we got in the end.

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Ireland - Day 9 - Gap of Dunloe

The weather forecast for our day nine had been pretty good, so we wanted to use the day for our hiking trip through the Gap of Dunloe. We booked the trip "the wrong way round" - starting our journey with a boat ride through the Killarney Lakes, and then walking though the famous gap, where we'd be picked up again at the end.

We started the tour in a Vintage Bus at O'Connors Pub in Killarney. The bus took us out to Ross Castle, where we transfered into a small wooden boat.

Then the ride across the Killarney Lakes began. First we crossed the biggest lake, Lough Leane, until we came to the Meeting of the Waters.

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Ireland - Day 5 - The Burren & Ennis to Killarney

Our fifth day didn't start out so well for me, I didn't feel good. We still made a lot of plans for that day since we didn't have much time in the Ennis region.

We had been pretty impressed by "the Burren" on our drive yesterday, so we decided to pay a visit to the Burren National Park. We came by a (closed) visitor center, so we just drove on with the vague information we had about the area. The road was really narrow, but we didn't come across many people out there. We came by a parking lot that seemed to be the starting point for different hiking paths, but wanted to get deeper into the rocky landscape.

After a while we had pretty much no idea where we were, as our map wasn't detailed enough to show the tiny road we were on. We didn't realize that we had actually driven out of the National Park already until we came into the next little town. There we found a little Tourist Information that had a map of the different hiking paths in the area.

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Day 10 - From Homer to Seward

Day 10 started with a lot of rain at night, which made packing up the tent much harder than hoped for. The rain kept pouring down while we travelled up the Sterling Highway towards Kenai, where we intended to do a short surprise-stop to visit some aquaintances of our hostfamily. Sadly the people we wanted to visit were't at home. Since it was still raining we ended up just driving around the town, going to the Visitors Center and then hitting the road again.

Just before getting to Seward we saw lots of cars parked in a rest area and people with cameras standing on a nearby bridge. It turned out they were watching an adult moose cow on one side, and two young moose on the other side of the bridge. So we also got out of the vehicle, grabbed our cameras and took a bunch of pictures. These moose were a lot closer than the ones we had seen before, so we managed to get a few pretty good pictures, especially of the moose cow.

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