World Snooze Tour Bed #60 Glory Legend Cruise, Halong Bay, Vietnam

WOW BED #60 !!!!!!!!

I love sleeping on boats, we spent 3 days on a wooden “junk” boat sailing around Halong Bay in Northern Vietnam.

Halong Bay means “Descending Dragon Bay” because the 2000 limestone rock islands look like the bony body of a dragon dipping in & out of the sea.

Glory Legend only has 15 cabins which is pretty small in comparison to our last cruise in the Caribbean on Oasis of the Seas ! We had a nice, small cabin with a balcony and a bathroom.

Each day we went kayaking to explore the caves & lagoons inside the limestone karsts,  One of the islands had a load of monkeys swinging from the trees and trying to get into our kayaks, they were looking for bananas.We kayaked for miles, after so much paddling it was nice to lie back in the kayak and relax while Mama rowed 🙂

We also jumped off the top of the boat into the sea, we had to climb over the railing and leap right out, it was about 8m high.

We visited a floating pearl farm where they showed us how they implant a piece of shell into the oyster so it will grow into a pearl, I had to choose an oyster to open to see if it had a pearl inside, theres only a 30% chance of a pearl actually growing but I was lucky and there was a pearl but it wasn’t a perfect one, only 3% of the oysters grow “perfect” pearls. My pearl was a bit oval so its only worth $10usd.

Squid Fishing, in the evenings they hung a strong spotlight over the side of the boat so we could catch squid. Its pretty difficult, you have a bamboo stick with a long piece of line and a hook with 3 hooks on the end, you don’t use bait, you just keep dangling the hook into the water and yanking it up and down trying to snag a squid as they float past, I was the only one to catch anything, I caught 3 squid each night, I think everyone else got a bit fed up with keep yanking the stick so they just let it sink into the water and waited for a squid to nibble the hook (which wasn’t going to happen !). I really like squid fishing 🙂

On one island we climbed 500 steps up to the lookout, the view was fantastic, I ran up to the top with some other kids and Mama arrived about 10 minutes after me. We also visited one of the biggest caves in Halong Bay, it was huge and very touristy, they had coloured lights everywhere, Mama said it looked like Santa’s Grotto, they lit up all the huge stalagmites that looked like willies and the guide said they were pointing fingers 😉

Cost: Glory Legend Cruise double balcony cabin. 4* $475 usd (3 days + 2 nights) All inclusive, Full board, transfers from Hanoi.