New Year's Eve on a boat

Before we start, I need to give you a heads up about this blogpost. We celebrated new year’s with Meli and Faye (girls we met over Christmas, so “ok” people) and they informed us that our Christmas blog made them too emotional. So, it is time to reach our East-Westfalian roots and write this one with a bit less drama.

We started in Hanoi. We’ve been there before. It was still very noisy. Nevertheless, we meandered around the city and looked at the rest of the highlights, we haven’t seen before. To say the city is not made for walking is an understatement. People use the sidewalk for parking their annoying scooter or sit and eat. Really not practical.

We spend the new years on a boat trip though Ha Long Bay. First some positive aspects:

• The Boat didn’t sink.

• No one died.

• We didn’t lose our backpacks, even though someone’s did fall out of the bus.

• We came back with all our socks!!

We left our Hostel on the 31st very early. Too early in my opinion. But we still had to travel a long distance to the ocean. The only good thing to say about the morning is that we could eat breakfast before we left. The veggies had too much garlic. The bus that picked us up was decent and the people seemed alright. Someone decided to choose the most inconvenient way to get to our big cruise ship as possible: After several hours of sitting on a bus we took a speedboat (in any other region of the world it would have been a regular boat), then drove over Cat Ba Island by bus (the view was kinda nice) and took the next small boat. The cruise ship didn’t disappoint. Four floors, but a bit too much gold for my taste. And I don’t really play billiard, so the big billiard table in the middle of the third floor was unnecessary, in my opinion. After arriving we ate lunch. The food was edible. The conversation ok. Then we could check into our rooms. They seemed very confused about the fact that there were two Sinas and that the two of us booked together. In the end we were the last people to get our room key (so we had to sit on our lunch table, wait and eat the rest of the food). After waiting at minimum 5 min longer than everyone else we didn’t get a room for ourselves (no one else did but it would have been a decent thing to do), but we had to share one with three Australian girls, who were really into Instagram or so. The room was big enough for five people and had a balcony with a private jacuzzi. We were on a ship so there is only a limited amount of space, considering that it was acceptable.

The area we cruised is called Ha Long Bay. There are a lot of tiny Islands with trees and bushes. It is truly stunning, if you are into that sort of beautiful nature stuff.

The afternoon we spent on a beach. There are a lot of small beaches in the area, why they had to stuff so many people on the small strip of land, where we stopped is a mystery to me. So, the two of us, Meli and Faye swam to the next small beach. The water was cold and salty. But the next beach was free of people so we could build a sandcastle. It has four towers and was called Sir Castellot. On the way back to the big ship we had the chance to jump of the small boat. The water was still cold and very wet.  

Back on the main boat we warmed up in our jacuzzi. The Australian girls invited other people into our private one, so it was really crowded. Most of them left when happy hour started and they wanted to get drinks. After sitting in a jacuzzi for a bit the water becomes too hot, so we took a shower and went to the sundeck as well. There we met up with Faye and Meli again and tried to socialise. I have realised once more that human beings are a weird species, Erumpents don’t feel like they have to talk about their food habits to other Erumpents. They would also beat most people on the ship at a dance battle.

Dinner was all right. They did a lottery afterwards. The guy on the table behind ours won a bottle of red wine. He shared it with us. It was awful. The first red wine that I tried that was better when served with ice. The Cocktails were too small, but cheap. The staff also didn’t understand the concept of Happy Hour as it was Happy Hour all night long. They should just call it Happy Night. The DJ did start right after dinner, but no one was in the mood to dance yet. And he played strange music. Everyone left for the sundeck. With all the lights on the ship we could only see the average amount of stars. We talked to people. Most of them were ok and we swapped travel tips. After a bit we decided to dance. At first on the sundeck but then we moved downstairs to the real dancefloor. By then the DJ was gone (why he was there in the first place is a mystery) and someone just connected their phone to the Soundsystem. Once more I was confused by how many people seemed overwhelmed by the simple concept of the Spotify queue. At a quarter to midnight, we went outside again to do a countdown for the new year. Like every year we counted twice. The phone clocks are just never fully synchronised. The cruise ship staff had organised some fireworks. Only very few, they were colourful and they exploded. After that we continued to dance, till they shut down the music at 2 am.

The next morning, they woke us up very early for breakfast. Everyone looked very tired. We had the chance to go kayaking. It was not too bad. The boat was rather simple, but we didn’t crash into a rock. The landscape looked very much the same as the day before. Then we ate an early lunch and took the same way too complicated trip back. The only difference was that we didn’t take the “speed boat” but the ferry. We learned why the speed boat was called speed boat. The ferry crawled through the water at the speed of the average slug. There were several conversations about whether we moved at all. But in the end we made it back to the main land and into our bus. Everyone slept. We were very tired. That night we took the sleeper train to Hue. It wasn’t bad.

Overall, we cannot complain about our New Years Eve. It was better than other years.