Halong Bay - Paradise cruise

Through our hotel, we booked onto the Paradise luxury 2 day 1 night cruise at Halong Bay.
http://paradisecruises.vn/itineraries.html

A shuttle bus picked us up from the hotel early that morning to the port.
It was a VERYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY bumpy and unpleasant ride.

Here's our cruise:

Itinery: 

(sorry, you have to rotate your head to read it because I couldn't rotate the picture here and I can't be bothered to reupload the photo) 

We were warmly welcomed :) 

(with rose petal thrown onto us as soon as we entered the cruise lol )

and we got upgraded to "Paradise suite" - with our very own jacuzzi 

Here's the ship plan

The room is very nice and clean

comfy bed, spacious

(not sure why there's a TV because we cannot watch any channel while we were there) 

At the top deck :) 

Floating snack shop 

The Buffet lunch was one of the best meal we have had during our stay

It gives a great taster of Vietnamese food

 so as usual.. I tried a bit of everything ..

there were quite a wide range of choice

I can't remember what exactly each dish was  ...  but they were good! 

I remember the stewed caramelized pork was particularly nice

Pretty Dessert :)

First stop was the "Surprising cave"

It was truly very magnificent.   Though as expected it was packed with tourist... 

luckily it IS a mega sized cave .. so it is forgivable 

 

bumped into this little monkey on the way back to the cruise

We walked up Titop island after that
 - which was packed with tourist again ..

view from the top (excuse the finger on the left ... )

in the evening.. we had cookery class - making Nem - Vietnamese spring roll 

and we got try some Vietnamese herbal shot - which was disgusting ... 

Dinner 

- was "fine" western food which was disappointing... 

maybe it was good quality western food (in Vietnam standard) 

but we were more interested in trying out more Vietnamese food given we are there... 

lots of cruises everywhere

Early in the morning, we got transferred into little bamboo boat

and we rowed through Luon cave

 into this lagoon :)
apparently sometimes there are monkeys here...
didn't see any though ...

some people doing kayaking... 

Breakfast : 

International breakfast was served after that 

- sticky rice, stir fried beef noodles, shrimp dumplings and pho 

and that's the end.......
We really enjoyed our short stay there. It was a great "escape" from the hustling stressful hanoi .
Halong bay was truly beautiful :)

we were dreading to get back on the shuttle bus for another 3 hours bumpy ride..
unfortunately we had to ... :(
(and it became a 4 hour ride because some random farmer decided to block the road)