The day started out at 7:00 on Saturday. It was also a holiday in Vietnam. This meant that traffic was terrible. The two lane so-called freeway turned into a four lane traffic jam. So we didn't arrive at Trang An until about noon. One big difference between Tam Coc and Trang An is that Trang An is a lot less crowded. It seems that the Western tourist haven't heard about Trang An yet. It was just Vietnamese tourist. If you consider that it was a holiday and thus "extra" crowded it was still less crowded than when we went to Tam Coc on a weekday. Trang An is a boat ride much like Tam Coc with the beautiful limestone mountains but without the rice paddies. They row you through 8 different caves the longest of which is over three football fields long. The whold thing takes about and hour and half. Unlike Tam Coc their is no pressure to buy things from your rower.
From Trang An we briefly visited Cuc Phuong National Park. It is a beautiful rainforest. However, we had to be home to pick up pictures in Hanoi so we only had about an hour there.
We returned to Hanoi, picked up pictures, and ate dinner. Aftwerwards we had to pack all of our things. We didn't get to bed until 12:00. We had to be up at 4:30 for the plane to China. Let me tell you we were tired.
