Kamikaze Cruises

Well I'm spending the second and final night on one of Ha Long's typical touristy cruises and I've mixed feelings. This is the cheesiest, tackiest, most contrived activity we have done the entire time we have been in Vietnam. Scams and mis-selling is rife. The food is intended for sustenance rather than enjoyment. The beer is too rubbish and expensive to drink. The other tourists.. *cringe*.. Ohh the other tourists. Last night was owned by a loud, arrogant European chap whose well projected, banal comments filled the night air. But that was only the warm up for tonight's Americans. I spent the evening with a book in hand so I could escape any cornered conversations, this far successful, at time of writing. The crew put on clubbing music whilst cruising through a blissful, serene sunset. The captain spends hours serenading himself alone at the karaoke machine each night. This really is not authentic Vietnam at all.

But despite all the problems this cruise is awesome!!!! We are having a blast!

So the boats. They're these floating hotels made to look like junk(s). Ours has two masts with sails but these are clearly for display purposes. And probably for the best as one of our masts is threatening to collapse. This actually paints an apt picture of the general condition of these boats. These are poorly maintained boats with mad, disgruntled and/or uncoordinated skippers. When docking with a pier or another boat a ramming approach seems to be adopted, reminiscent of a kamikaze intentionally inflicting damage whilst writing off their own vessel. Dustin saw one boat pummel another petty well this morning, causing some serious damage to a hand rail.

We've been enjoying some deck time here. My troupe have spent the last two nights sitting up on the top deck furiously playing card games for hours. Primarily Presidents and As, but also a bit of Hearts. Last night we were joined by two Americans and an Australian, the Americans were surprisingly good at P&As and proved to be the ones to beat.

The cruise included two days of kayaking, wandering through a cave, and a bit of swimming.

Today's kayak we spent trying to evade our guide, and we were rather successful at this. He eventually caught up and together we paddled through a cave to a lake. There were monkey type critters playing in the trees. Very cool. Back at the boat we were left waiting for one kayak from our group to return, having gone (intentionally) in a different direction from the rest of us. This gave us some time to purchase snacks from a rowing tout, a convenience store on water. Upon seeing the tout's selection the New Yorker with us screamed "Oh my God, OREOS!", thus setting herself up for a hard time haggling. After an hour plus of waiting, and a worried guide performing scouting missions, the missing comrades arrived just as lunch was being served. Clever sods.

From here we spent the afternoon swimming and jumping from the top deck of our taxi-like boat, - we had changed boats for the day trip - roughly 2-meters high. This same boat ended up breaking down, engine siezed in all it's glory, miles from anywhere. Smug Craig had commented on an unwell sounding engine hours earlier. We were towed around for the rest of the day until we returned to our floating hotel.

The final great activity, before the cards kicked in, was jumping off our big boat. Top deck. Four plus meters high. Freaky as. I have never jumped off anything this high (without a parachute or harness). Then again. And again and again. I hopefully have a bit of cool video footage of everyone going hard on the simultaneous team jumps. Bruised from impacts we called it a day.