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 4 - Resting at An Bang Beach

Today was our “day off” - we knew when we planned the trip that we would mostly be on the road, so we decided to take this day “off” for real, just going to the beach and doing nothing really. In the end it was a good decision because I also wasn’t feeling a hundred percent well and lying at the beach sounded a whole lot better than being on the road again.

We had decided the day before that we were going to risk renting a scooter one-way to Hue tomorrow, so we took the opportunity to rent a scooter for the day so Tim could practice driving in vietnamese traffic. We rode out to An Bang Beach and tried to find a nice and quite spot. We went to the far end of the beach, but due to the lack of shade anywhere else we stayed where there were parasols and lounge chairs. And then we did nothing. For a whole day.

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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