Monkey- & Cat Ba Island

After the supporting role in the new Hangover 4 film, the next day it was time to enjoy some culture and nature again. So our boat steered to various typical tourist spots. These included a pearl farm and Monkey Island. The pearl farm was quite interesting as I had never seen anything like it before. In order to increase the yield of pearls, pearl fragments are implanted into these shells and each individual shell is harvested monthly and examined for pearl growth. Despite this approach, pearls only grow in about 30% of the cultured shells, of which only 10% are good pearls. Aha! So it belongs to the category of absolutely useless general knowledge 🤓 (and that's always good 😉).

Monkey Island is a really beautiful little island with a really cool trekking trail up one of the limestone rocks. One could say that the trekking path is more of a via ferrata and actually not that demanding at all! So the sports program was also done 💪. As a reward for the climbing session, there was a beautiful view of the island and the surrounding rock formations.

The last stop was Cat Ba Island (the main island of Halong Bay). Here, once again, I enjoyed the luxury of a single room, even though a dorm room was booked 😎. If anyone happens to be there, simply go to the highest building for the sunset and take the elevator to the 12th floor. You will find a very nice sky bar with an impeccable view of parts of Halong Bay. In addition to that, there were pleasant conversations with a Dutch couple whom I had already met on the boat. Life is okay 😉