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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more