Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island, Vietnam (Post #81)
Hi,
Michele here…back in busy, bustling, horn honking, Hanoi.
We just returned from our 3 day, 2 night excursion to Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island. In the last blog I mentioned that I was worried about this excursion because it was incredibly cheap. It wasn’t a total disaster but it had its moments. We were picked up at 7:30am in a mini-bus as promised and we did drive to Halong City where we boarded a boat. The boat was pretty run down compared to some of the others we saw, but again, the tour was cheap so we knew this might be an issue. The lunch on board was fine – not awful, but nothing spectacular either (but there really wasn’t enough food and the beer costs well over a dollar which is about 2.5 times what we would buy it for in the store). We got a laught out of the fact that the rules for the boat staff were printed in English (which I’m pretty certain no staff person could read) and one of them was “Staff may not drink alcohol while working”. This was funny because the captain was drinking beer the entire boat trip.
On the positive side, the scenary was pretty spectacular (even though it was cloudy every day). The many small limestone islands jutting out of the water were beautiful and the water was a gorgeous blueish-green. Some of the tiny islands had holes in them that you could paddle through if you were in a kayak or small boat and many of the islands had very unique shapes (for example, one looked like a tall, skinny pencil). Here is a picture of one of the small inlets in Halong Bay:
After a few hours on board, we went to Song Sot cave. Although there are many caves in the islands in Halong Bay, this one is the most famous and is very large. Since it is such a tourist attraction, the cave is lit up with many different colored lights and has a walk way (quite different from the small tunnel caves we were crawling around in in Loas). After the cave we headed into a quite cove surrounded by tiny islands and a small house boat community. Here is a picture of the houseboat community:
When the boat stopped, several women with boat stores came over to try to sell us food and drinks from their boats/shops. Below is a picture of one of these shops:
We declined since we were about to go kayaking around the cove and surrounding area. Mike and I got in our kayak and set out to explore the shorelines of several of the little islands because we noticed there were caves not too far from the water. We couldn’t see that well into the caves but we enjoyed just being out in the water, going from one island to another, and kayaking around the Vietnamese house boat communities. After a while, my arms were really burning from all the paddling and it was close to 5:00pm so we headed back to the boat.
We got back on board and there were several problems with the rooms and the room assignments. Before we headed out on the kayak, we kept asking if we could get our room key. The coordinator kept stalling and stalling and finally told us there was a problem with our room but that it would be fixed when we got back (uh huh…sure it will…). When we got back he gave us a very nice room – wow, all windows, nothing wrong with it, this is great! We saw him removing things from the room and we piled our stuff in there. Then we hear a French woman tell him angrily, “I want your name and your company’s name!” Five seconds later he tells us we are moving to a different room. The French woman goes into our room and we go to a room next to the engine that smells like diesel fuel. Later we learned she had our room and we had her room and the whole room thing was a mess. The bottom line is that we ended up with the room next to the engine which was awful. Despite the fact that we had both the door and window open, we were choking on diesel fumes until 9:30pm when they turned the engine off. The smell got better but it was still pretty bad. In the morning when we blew our nose, black stuff came out. (Although this might seem bad, this is not such a rare occurance on our trip since the air quality in many other countries is quite poor.)
So, we didn’t die on the boat from the fumes and in the morning, I tested the hot water shower in our little bathroom. This was the thing that was being fixed in our room while we were kayaking. Well, it didn’t work. There was boiling hot water for about 5 seconds and then the heater died along with the water. But this didn’t matter because about the time I was testing the water, we got a knock on the door. The guy said, “Boat broken. You go other boat now.” We looked out our window and saw we were attached to another boat. We needed to get our stuff together (you know, pack up) but we got two more knocks on the door with the guy saying, “You go now! Now!”
We eventually got everything packed up and we went to the other boat. I think the other boat was not prepared for us since we had bed sheets as table clothes and no napkins. We had a breakfast of bread, butter, and jam, and we all used the table cloth as a napkin. After breakfast we continued on to Cat Ba Island (the only inhabited island in Halong Bay) and passed more tiny green islands, house boat communities, and even pearl harvesting farms. Once we got to Cat Ba Island, Mike and I were sure we would get a basement room in some crappy (or creepy) hotel. Instead, we were surprised to find that we got the best room in a very nice hotel on the island. We had a beautiful view of Cat Ba Harbor. The picture below is taken from inside the room, looking out our window:
We had one hour of down time before we were scheduled to go on a 3 hour hike with a guide through Cat Ba Island National Park. We figured this would be some wamby-pamby, whimpy, walk through the forest. We met our guide and saw the other people who would be doing the 3 hour trek with us. Two girls had on sweaters and ski parkas (and it was probably 70 degrees and very humid); one family had on fashionable outfits and dress shoes, and one guy had on all cotton clothing. Yep, this was going to be no big deal. The guide takes off at neck breaking speed. Whoa! Dude, slow down! Mike and I are the only people that can keep up with him. After about an hour we start the rock climbing portion of our trek. We are literally climbing up steep volcanic rock cliffs in the middle of a bunch of brush. Although Mike and I are sweating, everyone else is dying and the most of the people simply can’t make it to the top. At the top of the mountain we can see a bay and a small village. We eventually go back down the mountain and are transported back to our hotel. It was a great workout with some impressive scenary.
At night we head out along the one main street of Cat Ba Island (the island is inhabited with only 7000 people) and find where the Vietnamese people hang out. It is along the water front near a fountain lit up with different colored lights. The fountain spray moves back and fourth in rhythm with music that is coming from somewhere (where, we don’t exactly know.) We visit a bar that serves red wine from Dalat, Vietnam, then head back to our hotel with the awesome view.
In the morning, we spend about 3 hours on the boat going back to Halong City. There’s nothing to report about this segment of the trip except that when we pulled into Halong Bay, our boat captain was going way too fast (maybe he was drinking beer again?) and we crashed into another boat. Not a lot of damage was done to the other boat but there was some.
In the end, we agreed that for $39 we had a funny, memorable, 3 day, 2 night trip on Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island and if we had paid more, it’s likely everything would have went smoothly and we wouldn’t have as many good stories to tell. (Now is that positive thinking, or what?!)
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Tags: Category #22: Vietnam
Michele Harmon
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