Vesak Colombo Sri Lanka

 

A great aspect of living near Gangaramaya Temple is that the Buddhist events are a short walk away. This weekend was the celebration of Vesak. The streets near us were filled with festive lights and displays.

Bentota Sri Lanka

 

Bentota is about 2 hours south of Colombo in Sri Lanka. It's a perfect spot for a 3-day weekend. We explored Bawa gardens and houses, went kayaking through the mangroves, and enjoyed the sunsets on the Indian Ocean.

Hong Kong

 

Our sixth and final port of the cruise was in Hong Kong. The nice thing about this port was docking in the middle of the city for easy access to things around the cruise terminal. Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. It's an interesting city with a separate operating framework from mainland China. For example, they still use the Hong Kong Dollar.

Ha Long Bay Vietnam - Day 2

 

We had an included excursion for the second day which would have been on a tour boat which took the same route as the boat that took us kayaking. We canceled that and went to town on our own instead, which was much better than wasting a day on a repeated experience. Fortunately we figured this out on our own.

Ha Long Bay Vietnam - Day 1

 

Our fifth port with the cruise was the absolutely amazing Hạ Long Bay Vietnam. I couldn't get enough of the scenary with these islets. There's so many pictures here that I'll break this up into two posts. 

Da Nang Vietnam

The fourth port of our two week cruise had us in Da Nang Vietnam. It was just a one day included excursion but it was a really good one. It included a museum with old stone statues, a huge store with new marble statues, the huge Lady Buddha statue in the Monkey Mountains (distant pic above), back to the My Khe Beach (pic above), and some pictures of the Dragon Bridge before heading back to the cruise ship. It was a great day! 

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) Vietnam

 

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) was a wonderful city to visit for three days. One of our booked excursions was canceled, which thankfully gave us a free day to explore on our own and visit the fine arts museum. You get a different perspective and feeling about a place through their art and this city's art museum was a really good one.