By traveling this country for a week now I have to say that I am in love. The people are welcoming and friendly, the food is way more than just fried rice and noodles and the landscape is absolutely mind blowing.

Even though the locals work hard, there is such an atmosphere of ease and joy of life in every interaction. Many locals don´t speak English, but still approach you with an authentic feeling of curiousity and good-will.

You feel that people still truly care about each other. It even happened to us, that people recommended to check out their competition – because ¨well, it is good for them¨.

Mirte and me also experienced this closeness of the people, when approaching our kayaktour in the Da Nang bay.

The Da Nang Bay is part of the same impressive landscape as Ha Long bay – huge rocky islands of limestones rise up of hundreds – even thousands – out of the vietnamese sea – but just a lot less touristic.

As you have to count in around 1000 kayaks in the Ha Long area, Mirte and me were often the only ones on the water.

But back to the close-knit community of the Vietnamese people. The government forbid kayaks directly at the shore, so we had to take a shuttle – in form of a small fishingboat – to one of the countless islands.

You might think the only thing you would see from then on are islands, boats and some kayaks. Not here.

In the whole shore, the locals created the so called floating villages – hundreds of huts only reachable by boat, many of them even having dogs and small gardens on them.
And when passing those floating homes one by one, you could just imagine how open and cooperative their inhabitants must be to make a living literally on the water.

When Mirte and me kayaked through the bay we saw more of those settlements, sometimes introduced by some swimming trash – apart from which the bay was surprisingly clear.

It was a great experience and we felt like floating through the ¨Pirates of the Carribean¨ movies, while exploring lagunes, hidden beaches, caves and even a resort island (which was a bit akward, since we obviously were not supposed to be there).

Flipping our Kayak after the first five minutes – which was not Mirte´s fault at all :p – did not make this any less amazing.

To be honest, there is not much more I can tell, except for the fact that this natural piece of art almost seems to be too good to be true. Even my words end here :D.

In the evening we still had dinner in Cat Ba – a super cute place and Mirte and me got tipsy by sharing one beer..

To this I have to add, that the Vietnamese appearantly ADORE karaoke. You can do it everywhere, everybody does it and even if there is no station or you don´t have friends that want to join you, this is no problem.
There were countless times, when we saw groups of three, two or even one single person, singing Karaoke – with full enthusiasm.

And so – like basically everytime you go through the streets of a vietnamese town – we were accompanied by the lovely sound of Karaoke in our last evening in Cat Ba.