We found Jurassic Park in Vietnam.

We were warned that it was cold in northern Vietnam but we questioned, really, how bad can it be? We decided to brave it out so we could see the famous natural formations of Halong Bay and took a 19 hour sleeping bus to Hanoi. This was our longest bus ride and the it also happened to be on the roughest, most run-down bus we've seen. We laughed, felt like crying, and prayed that we would just arrive safely. We stuffed the broken air conditioning with our pillowcases and kept each other company and were entertained by our new friend beside us shooting a mickey of vodka with his Valium pills! Crazy.
When we arrived in Hanoi our questions about the weather were quickly answered as we were greeted with blowing winds, pouring rain and freezing cold. We were so excited of our hot showers in our hotel room but when we got there, it was 108 stairs (..ya, I counted) to our room which had no hot water or heat and we could see our own breath in the room. At this moment that I regretted our decision to come to Hanoi. We weren't planning on seeing cold weather on our trip so neither of us packed any decent clothing for the cold. We layered ourselves with basically all of our clothes in our backpacks to try stay warm and didn't change out of them for the 3days we were there. Thank God for dry shampoo!
Hanoi was a crazy city with insane traffic and people everywhere to turned. When the intensity got to be a bit much, we booked one night cruise on Halong Bay. We heard that it was beautiful but we were surprised at how stunning it really was. We were really lucky to board our cruise with 3 other Canadian couples, a sweet old Swiss couple, two hilarious Norwegian girls and a few Australians an a lone American. It was a really great crew of people to enjoy the great meals and other activities with. We went kayaking and explored the amazing limestone caves. After dinner, we sat off the back of the boat, drank beer, ate the vietnamese version of wagon wheels and fished for squid. Jeremy's determination paid off when he caught the biggest squid, nearly a foot in size, three hours later.
Halong Bay was completely mystical and like Jeremy explained it, it was like we were in Jurassic park. It made braving it through the cold completely worth it. It was beautiful, breathe taking and so serene and surreal.
With our time in Vietnam coming to a quick end, we had one more bowl of delicious pho before we got on another bus to Laos. Except this one, longest of them yet, 22hrs.
-Kendal