tomtnt

Our (long) video from the 2/15/2013 sailing from HK to SINGAPORE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=1_j2O6uPxKk&vq=hd1080

That is a great price - the best I have seen!

 

For 10 people, we paid $78 pp for the full day including a seafood lunch. With Best Cruises.

Just to reiterate WhitsEnd review regarding Stephen and bestcruises. I posted this on another thread:

We just returned from the 2/15 sailing and booked our Halong and Saigon excursion through Stephen for our group of 10. At Halong, Stephen's tour guide was about 30 minutes late showing up, but when he arrived, we had a great time. He was very knowledgeable, spoke perfect English, and willing to take us wherever we wanted including lunch at a local "bun cha" place in Halong town. The junk to the fishing village and school was also unforgettable - it was a remote village and no one was there except for us. Passing out pencils to the school kids was an experience my children will never forget.

In Saigon, Stephen (he's based in Halong but has connection throughout the country) set us up with a local tour guide from Saigon - our Saigon tour guide was hands-down, our best guide for the entire trip. He went out of his way to arrange EVERYTHING. Any restaurants we wanted to try, he would call ahead and make arrangements to insure we were able to be seated immediately. We wanted to make some suits and vietnamese dresses - so he called up a seamstress who met us at a restaurant to take our measurements. She met us at our hotel the following morning for the fitting and then met us at a second hotel later on in the day to deliver the suits and dresses.

The only issues I had with Stephen were: he did not arrange the port permit in Saigon which meant we had to walk outside the port to meet our driver and guide (15 minutes). We booked a combo Halong + Saigon tour and he insisted that we pay in full at the end of Halong (rather than paying for the Saigon tour in Saigon). But all-in-all, a great experience.

Lastly, if you can, consider bringing an unlocked android or iphone - sim cards with unlimited data are literally $5-10 at each port of call and are invaluable. They allow you to call your tour operator if they are late or if you are delayed and you can surf the web to research restaurants etc.

I will post a full review of our trip shortly. We had a great time and miss our time in South East Asia. Still recovering from some immense jet lag!