Halong Bay

Halong Bay is in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.   After Colleen left, I decided to head in that direction. Since I am protesting the cattle calls of group tours, I consulted the traveller's bible for a route I could take solo. It advised to take a bus to Hai Phong then catch a boat to Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay where boat trips are offered everywhere. Sounded easy enough.

When I got to the bus station, they picked my bag off my back and, literally, shoved me on a bus. I confirmed it was going to Hai Phong and took a seat. When we started the bus was going so slow pedestrians were passing us. Since I was the only non-Vietnamese on the bus, it was unlikely that they were screwing with me, but my suspicious nature allowed me to contemplate it for a few moments anyway.  After a while I figured out the driver's assistant was hanging out the door soliciting additional passengers. He did this until the bus was full then we were off.....

When we got to Hai Phong, the bus dropped me off in the middle of a random road by slowing down to a crawl, opening the door and handing me my backpack.  Someone pointed to the back of the bus and said Halong.  I got out and started walking. When I got to the corner, I asked someone how to get to Cat Ba Island, but no one spoke English.  A young guy offered me a motorbike ride and when I politely declined he started yelling at me and mocking me. This drew a crowd of people who started laughing at me. Not knowing what they were saying or what to do, I just stood there.  A guy with a yellow hard hat came up to me and pointed me in a direction and said Halong.  I started walking again, leaving the ridicule behind.  The direction he pointed me in was intercepted by a roundabout with roads that did not continue on my same path. I stopped to ask some women who were sitting on the side of the road, but they didn't speak English and  the only help they offered was to raise the handfull of baby chickens they were holding as if I wanted to purchase one.  Disgruntled, I turned around, and saw the guy with the construction hat had followed me and was going to save me from further pain by giving me more precise directions. 

He showed me to a bus, it was the wrong bus. After about 5-10 minutes of showing the driver my map and explaining I did not want to go to where he was going, he opened the door and let me out. I was back to walking around asking where to go again. Have I mentioned I had my 45 lb back pack and it was about 34 degrees Celsius? 

Eventually I made it to the ferry port, and was rerouted due to the weather conditions.  The new route was a bus to different boat, to another bus. I paid 240,000 Dong. The Vietnamese paid 100,000. I sat by a 3-month old baby who kept starring at my boobs making a sucking noise. His father openly chuckled as he carried the baby in his lap, holding his bouncing head for the 20-minute ride through the freight port. 

The boat looked pretty sturdy, but was filled beyond capacity with men, women, children and motorbikes.  When it started pouring down rain, everyone ran to one side of the boat. Given the amount of rain in Vietnam, this was not an anticipated reaction. I held my ground on the wet side hoping to keep the boat from tipping over. I was not going down on a Vietnamese boat in the middle of a freight port.

After an uneventful second bus ride, I arrive in Cat Ba town. It is gorgeous here. It is like Krabi with limestone rock formations jetting out of the sea.  This photo is from my $12 a night hotel room.  It is overlooking the Bay, which is a small city of boats and floating homes housing local fishermen.  Some of the boats are large, but there are many small, wooden boats (no bigger than a boston whaler) with a tiny canopy for protection from Typhoon downpours.  The bed is a heap of clothes in the middle.  Intermixed with the boats are small wood-framed homes smaller than most kitchens and often housing a family of four.

The people in Cat Ba are fantastic.  It is big rock climbing destination and on my first night I ended up bouldering at one of the local schools.  Bouldering is when you climb up on a interior wall, constructed of stone, and horizontally scale the wall around the room.  I was not very

 good, but it was fun.  It was here where I found two Irish girls to go onto Halong Bay with.  Although the Typhoon was over, boat trips had not been rescheduled, so you had to find your own group and rent a boat.  When we met up in the morning, it was in the middle of a monsoonal downpour.  The girls had me convinced it would be an experience regardless of the weather and I decided to ignore the raging rain and take the boat trip.  As soon as we got to the boat, the rain slowed significantly and the day was gorgeous.  

We had the entire boat to ourselves and were one of a few boats on Halong Bay.  Around noon we took out kayaks and started heading through a cave.   Half way through, we saw a shark.  According to the boat guides, there are no sharks in Halong Bay, but there was a large fin swimming around at the end of the cave and heading towards us at one point.  I have never kayaked as fast as I did to get out of there. We were rewarded with the sun coming out.