the road to Ha Long Bay...

SUCKS!! Yesterday we woke early in Hoi An, got some breakfast pho, and were on our way to the last two legs of our open tour. A short 5 hour bus took us to Hue where we were able to check our email and see that we could arrange a couple days of DWS (deep water soloing) before the tide gets too low to do it. Bummed that we can't have more days, but glad that we can at least do a little bit. Also the guy I was emailing with said that we could do some sport climbing in Cat Ba, and rent ropes, chalk bags, everything we need, if we still wanted to climb after that. We'll see how we feel; we may just wanna relax and cruise around on kayaks or something...

Anyway, Hue was a quick four hour stopover...Randy wasn't feeling very well (the bus was really cold and there were two vents on Randy the entire time) so we went to a pharmacy and got some meds. At that point we had killed the time we had left, so we headed back to Sinh Cafe to catch our VERY long bus (turned out to be around 14 hours). I took some sleeping meds and drank a beer and I was able to sleep a lot more comfortably than the first 12 hour bus ride.

Arriving in Hanoi, we immediately looked to get a bus/ferry ticket to Cat Ba island (the island where many Ha Long Bay tours depart) and found we had missed the last one by minutes :( Bummed, we bought our ticket for 11:20 am and got a bowl of pho for breakfast. Now we're sitting in an internet cafe, where use of their internet/computers is 4000vnd per hour (about 0.20 USD). Hopefully gonna waste the next couple hours here until our bus ride.

Unfortunately Randy and I have had our fill of city-life for the time being, so being here in Hanoi is not something we're too keen on. We got swindled on the taxi ride here, and when we asked about bus rides to Cat Ba, a guy lied and said there were buses every hour (hm...now we're waiting three hours for the ONLY bus to Cat Ba?)... Needless to say, we are really excited to get on our way to more island/beach life...and CLIMBING!!!

Will post again once we've established a home base in Cat Ba...