Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

Our second day in Halong Bay started with an early breakfast. It was supposed to start at 8am, but apparently a critical mass of the passengers got up early, and the crew decided to start early. We were the last to arrive at 7:30.

We cruised around the karsts for a bit longer, then dropped anchor to wait for another boat that would take us to the island resort owned by our tour company. After an hour on this smaller boat, we were transferred to a third, even smaller boat that took us in to the pier.

The resort is pretty nice. Thatch-roofed bungalows along a strip of sandy beach at high tide, with additional rocky shore at low tide. We can see across to Cat Ba town, which looks like it's just hotel towers.

After lunch, we went kayaking. We did a loop around the island and then puttered around for a bit, waiting for the tide to rise enough for us to cross over an isthmus we'd noticed and do another loop around the southeast tip of the island (now a separate island itself). Jessica tried to help me improve my kayaking stroke, but I'm still not very good. I'm having a lot of trouble matching her rhythm. She has a pause in the stroke for resting that I can't seem to get the hang of. I naturally just continue to the other side of the stroke instead of stopping.