I woke up feeling a lot better for about 13 hours sleep. Anna explained the joys of last nights dinner, so I was kind of glad I’d bailed early but it sounds like they all had a great laugh, so I'd missed out on that.
Breakfast was served, there was a dodgy ‘fresh’ fish element of course, but I just focused on the bacon, fried egg and toast! I'm still not feeling great, but I managed to get that down no problem.
Today we were going to visit a particular island with steps built into it and a pagoda on the top. Apparently there are nearly 2000 islands or islets in Halong Bay by the way.
Here is a picture of one of the many shop boats we saw. They actually supply the boat we are on, and most of the other tourist boats I guess. We even saw one boat just like this one which was full of cans of petrol! I don’t recall seeing one single male rowing a boat, seemed to be all women. Spotted a few men on the row boats, just not doing much on the front while the lady did her job:
Here is the island, you can see it has a fairly steep incline!: 
We had to get to this island by using the smaller boat which our main boat normally tows behind it. This small boat seemed to be knocked together out of old planks of wood in half an our or so, and just have an outboard motor bolted onto the back. But it worked surprisingly well (didn’t sink and moved forward). Getting onto this small boat from the main boat was an experience not to be forgotten, that’s best described with a video which I plan to add later.
Getting to the top of the island was REALLY hard work, my legs were burning and I had to stop for a few seconds just let my muscles relax otherwise the pain was too much. I eventually huffed and puffed my way up to the top, once I had caught my breath I could enjoy the view with Anna.
Here is one of the best photos, you can see some more in the album at the bottom:
View down to our boat “The Jewel of the Bay” from about half way up the island:
The decent was naturally much less tiring, but you had to be careful as it was very steep. We had an exciting boarding trip back to the Jewel of The Bay on the small boat again. Happy (or sad) to report nobody fell in!
From here we had a final yummy fish lunch with our group, who I had grew fond of by this point, they were a really good bunch:
Journey back to Hanoi was bumpy and long. But lots to look at out of the window to keep us amused! E.g. Babies in bicycle baskets, Calf's and cows randomly running across to roads, dogs on mopeds, near head on collisions with other vehicles, mopeds with Mum, Dad and two kids onboard! Lady carrying big baskets FULL of eggs giving us a wave as we snapped her (missed the wave):
This place is crazy.
