as219

We just returned from our 2-week Vietnam trip, which included a 3D/2N cruse on one of the Paradise Luxury boats. While I'll post a more detailed review of the entire trip in the TR forum once I get over jetlag, I thought I'd post a couple of substantive points here (in no particular order).

* Overall, we had a glorious, amazing time with the Paradise folks. A couple of minor quibbles here and there, but I would without hesitation recommend this company.

* Though Paradise has their own, private cruise terminal (^), we saw lots of other boats during our cruise. One thing that distinguishes Paradise from other lines is that all rooms the Paradise Luxury boats had private balconies. For regular rooms (I think they're called "Deluxe"), the balcony is narrow and small - enough for a thin table for two. We had a Terrace Suite, and our balcony - a platform at the bow-end of the ship - had room for the table for two as well as two chaise lounge chairs. For us, even though there were plenty of wonderful places for relaxing on the boat, having this private space was worth the price and then some. Others I imagine couldn't care less about the balcony. If you do, though, it seems to me Paradise is the best way to get balcony space at the low end.

* Food. The food ranged from terrific to, well, weird. Breakfast buffets were as you'd expect in SE Asia: something for everyone and then some. Big ^. Lunch on Day 1 was a Vietnamese buffet, which we enjoyed. Lunch on Day 2 was a set-menu served family style on the day boat (more on this below). Some dishes were better than others. Pretty much every edible animal was on the menu. If you're at all squeamish about things like razor clams and calamari, ask for the vegetarian option (my wife did, which was terrific). Dinners were set menus served course-by-course at your table. Hard to know how to describe the dinners, other than to say they weren't quite Vietnamese but not quite non-Vietnamese either. I would say it's what the Vietnamese think Westerners think is high-end food. Dinners included things like squid stuffed with pork and ostrich grilled two-ways. They weren't bad per se, but they were strange. We should have requested vegetarian. That said, we certainly didn't go hungry, and we had a lovely time at meals.

* Drinks. Yes, the drinks are expensive for Vietnam. No, they're not expensive by Western standards. At the low end were lame-but-acceptable wines for about $30 a bottle. $50 got you something decent. I would say these prices represented 300% markups over NYC retail, but then again it's Vietnam. Beers were about $4-5 each, and mixed drinks a couple bucks more. Again, expensive for Nam, but not horrendous IMO. Happy hours were a better deal, with a subset of drinks at half price and free canapes. We took advantage of this nightly . In retrospect, we should have brought a small bottle of cognac or some such after-dinner spirit for drinking on our balcony. (It was really too hot for red, and there was no place to store white.) If you're a drinker, this is what I recommend.

* Schedule. Something no one really tells you about these cruises is that "3D/2N" really means only 46 hours on the boat. Day 1 starts when you're picked up at your hotel in Hanoi at 8am. You get to Halong around noon-ish. Day 3 ends at 10am when you leave the boat for your trip back to Hanoi. So yes, two nights on the boat, but only one full day on the water. The so-called "2D/1N" cruises are an even worse deal. You're only on the boat for 22 hours, a good chunk of which is taken up with a couple of day-trips off of the boat that aren't that spectacular because all the boats on teh Bay (it seems) do the same trips at the same time. If there is any way at all to do the longer trip, I highly recommend doing so. This is true for almost all boats at Halong, so keep this in mind when deciding between the 3D2N and 2D1N cruises.

Another word on schedule: A good chunk of the time it's expected you'll leave the main boat for excursions on their day boat, called the "Paradise Explorer," where passengers from all five Paradise boats are aggregated together. I think this is par for the course for most cruise companies, but you should know this is how things roll. Our schedule looked something like this:

Point is, you spend a lot of time not on the boat due to the scheduling logistics of having passengers on different time-frames. In the end, we were okay with this, but it's something you should know. Also, Day 2 activities were a lot more fun and substantive that Day 1. (Another reason to do a longer cruise!)

* Transportation. Be advised that the arranged ride from Hanoi to Halong (and vv) is something of a slog. It was cheap, at $35 pp r/t, but four hours in a van without a lot of room to move around -- and only one stop, at a touristy restaurant/store -- is nothing to write home about. In retrospect, we would have opted for a private car. It's another $100 or so, but we could have stopped when and where we wanted and it surely would have been more comfortable.

* Cost. Our terrace suite on the Paradise Luxury, for 3D/2N, with shared transfers to/from Hanoi cost a total of $1080, booked through Asia Tour Advisor. Was this expensive? I gather it was. Could we have done it more cheaply on another boat? Yes. (The quotes we had for the Bhaya were less.) Do we wish we had? Absolutely not. Our room was lovely and spacious (for a boat), balcony stunning, service top notch.

* Misc. Sadly, the bay is really polluted in places. I wouldn't swim in it, but others did without any complaints. But the views are absolutely stunning and well worth the trip. Also: While there are lots of boats plying the bay, it was only noticable really on Day 1, when the boat anchored for the cave/island day trips. Most of the time, the boats all spread out, so it didn't feel that claustrophobic.

* Final Note. There was one annoyance I feel bound to report. On the evening of day 1, the captain of our boat came to us to let us know that he had arranged for us to be "ugpraded" to a bigger, better suite on the Paradise Peak, their 'higher-end" boat. At first, I thought, wow, this is great. What self-respecting FTer would refuse an upgrade? But on further reflection, and some hesitation on his part, I wondered what was really going on. So before dinner, he arranged for my wife and I to take a quick boat ride over to the other ship to see the room. Long story short, I didn't see it as an upgrade at all. The suite was indeed bigger, and more luxurious, but in place of an outdoor balcony was an indoor, enclosed "breakfast nook." The boat did have other suites with outdoor balconies...but those, of course, were occupied and therefore unavailable to us. Since the entire point of our booking our suite was to have the larger outside space, I declined the upgrade. After a few unconfortable minutes where it wasn't clear whether we actually had a choice in the matter, the captain demurred and let us stay as is. So word to the wise: make sure to lay eyes on the goods before accepting "upgrades" which are really all about the Paradise people mis-booking, not their wanting to reward you with more space.

Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions.