Halong Bay

Yesterday afternoon we walked into Hanoi's city center and bought tickets to the water puppet show (it was all sold out except for the 8pm performance). We killed the time between ~4 and the show going to the Hoan Kiem Lake and the Den Ngoc Son (or Jade Mountain Temple) which sits on a lovely little island to which one has to walk across a beautiful red foot bridge.
After watching a man publically urinate we grabbed dinner at a Korean restaurant (at which they didn't give us the Korean type food menu) where we ordered non-Korean food (which wasn't that good). We literally sat around for 2 hours and then went to the puppet show. It was short but fantastic. The theater is called Thang Long Water Puppet Theater and I recommend that you either google or go to www.en.wikipedia.org to look it up.
We were going to wander around and sightsee in Hanoi today but we consulted our guide book which said that many sights were closed because it was a Monday. Instead we took tomorrow's planned trip to Halong Bay today.
The morning started out rushed as the minibus arrived 15-45 minutes early (they gave us a window of 8-8:30 and it arrived at 7:45). It was a 3 hour drive to Halong Bay (that doesn't include the time it took to pick up all the other guests at their hotels around the city). The drive was nice though and while Thao slept I took photos of the countryside.
We caught up with another minibus owned by the same company in Halong City and all boarded a "tourist junk" to cruise the bay. We're not certain but we think that the tour operator had to find a boat that would take us when we arrived on the docks (like everyday he finds a new boat to take his passengers on?). We actually also had to walk through one boat to get to our boat because the boats were parked 2 deep!
The tour started out EXTREMELY slow while lunch was served (not too bad, pretty tasty in fact, too little). While we were going slow we could use the fans inside the boat but once the boat started going faster they had to be turned off "to make the boat go." Okay. We stopped at an island called Dau Go and visited two caves, Hang Dau Go and Hang Thien Cung. The latter was only found in the 1990's and is lit with pink, green, and blue floodlights.
After the caves, we got back on the boat and toured around for about 3 hours (the last ~45 minutes was going extremely slow again).
We then got back to the minibus and drove the repeat 3 hours. Arriving starved in Hanoi, Thao and I just returned from eating dinner. The best part of the tour and boat (lunch inclusive) was that it was only $27!
We're now off to shower and go to bed. Tomorrow is Hanoi's sites...