Visiting Halong Bay from Cat Ba Island

Introducing Cat Ba Island

In order to avoid mass tourism, we decided to stay in Cat Ba Island for visiting Halong Bay. Cat Ba is a very small island it has only 12000 inhabitants for 354 square kilometers. The national park on the island is 280 square kilometers. It is 80% of the island.

To come by motorbike, it is possible to take a boat from Dinh Vu, this boat go directly to the island but its also possible to take 2 boats. One from Dinh Vu to Cat Hai and then Cat Hai to Cat Ba.

Boat tour to Halong Bay

As written before, we have first visited the island, see this story. The day after, we paid 350000 VND per person (14€/15$) to do a boat tour. We booked our tour at Alibaba's hotel which was the cheapest tour according to Italian backpackers we have met on the island before booking the tour.

We are not big fans of tour but we enjoyed this one. We took the boat at 8.30, we decided to stay outside to enjoy the view. Before lunch we did kayaking into a bay, went through caves with the kayaks. After the lunch, we had a great nap on the boat's deck. There is a sofa on it :).

Later, we went to Halong Bay and had a jump from the boat in the water, that was incredible to swim between big rocks. To finish our trip, we went on the Monkey Island and hiked to see the view from the top.