All of our group (so that’d be four of us) put their hands up for this morning’s optional activity: kayaking.
For breakfast we wimped out and went straight back to the place we’d gone for dinner, but hey: it was cheap and the food was good. And we could sit and watch the bay wake up, and the boats hum about, and the American tourists gibber about whatever, while the French tourists tried not to look guilty.
Unsuccessfully.
At 8.30am, out the front of our hotel (the ‘Sun and Sea’ hotel) we all go ton the back of a motorbike each and had a short but incredibly fun ride over the hill and down the other side to the bay where the kayak hire places hide. I know everyone comes back from Vietnam saying ‘Go on a motorbike ride’, so I’ll go one better and say it before I get back. Come to Vietnam and go on a motorbike ride. We’ll be in Saigon from the 8th of November until the 13th.
With my wallet and phone in a water-resistant bag we climbed into our kayak, with Alice at the front to steer, and manouevred ourselves out into the bay. I can picture a time when I might have thought about how deep the water was getting, but Tuan pointing the way ahead from behind, we tacked our way around a little headland, puzzled more than somewhat about why we couldn’t get the boat to go straight.
We tried taking turns paddling and discovered it was me that was bringing about the rightward drift. (Starboard drift?)
I tried paddling softly on the left and harder on the right; but no joy. Or once on the left and twice in the right; no dice. No joy and no dice. Meanwhile from the rear we gathered that we were to head toward the beach across the inlet, the beach where the other kayaks were. I dug the paddles in a bit harder and one of them twisted itself more than halfway off the end of the pole. The plastic basically sheared, and peeled itself like an orange in the middle of a nervous bust-down.
Alice kept paddling like normal and I rowed Islander-style, switching hands, and we gained our approach speed to slide smoothly up onto the beach. Such soft white sand, warm teal water, and a sign saying to beware of monkeys who may either bite you or carry off your possessions. Yes. This is the monkey island we later discovered marked on the map.
So we de-jacketed, pulled the boats further out of the water, and went swimming.
I said something in yesterday’s journal about setting sail for paradise, and we had arrived.
* * *
According to Tuan the world record for skimming rocks is 81 bounces. Naturally we were obliged to try and beat that; I think we both got to about 6 but anyway we had fun; while not all good things must come to an end, this one just moved on to the next part, which was paddling back across the bay to take the scenic route to the kayak rental company. Sadly there fishing nets up and we had sweated our way around the red and white marker post and into the inlet before we saw them. We had to paddle all the way back out, and back along the marginally less scenic route, towards the brown and yellow boats which told us where to turn back in. I waved the broken paddle as we drifted between boat and floating walkway, and held up the detached end in the other end, but the man waiting near the edge said it was no problem.
Not for him it wasn’t; he didn’t have to paddle with it.
On dry land we put our wet shoes back on, and in our wet shorts and trousers we got back on the motorbikes and ambled back over the hill and down again. There was time for a shower before we had to check-out, but not enough time to rinse or dry our swimming/kayaking clothes. And we had to be on a ferry to Hai Phong (the faster way back to Ha Noi) at 2pm. So we did nothing more than pin the wrung-out wet clothes to the outside of our bags, and then walk back down that same cafe for lunch. Lunch didn’t take long enough, and nobody felt like walking anywhere, so we ordered another fresh juice and took our sweet, sweet time.
The ferry didn’t leave at 2pm. I had some notion of a classy, refreshing open air ride across the bay. Instead we got a ferry that left at 2.50pm, after and only after they had fit in as many people as they possibly could and insisted that everyone pile their baggage up in an incestuous pile in the 1m x 2m space at the front of the seating area, which was closed in by windows and a low ceiling. But I doth complain too much; at the ferry point the Intrepid-brand van was right there to meet us, and drive us back to Ha Noi, where a vast rain storm had just finished, and we stopped along the way for an ice cream, a toilet-break, and a great many more mosquito bites in the toilet.
In Ha Noi we were dropped off out the front of the same hotel, in wet gutters, motorbikes honking their way through, around or between the rain-jacketed people. Tuan called our room to say that he had made a mistake, that we weren’t leaving at 7am to catch the overnight train to Sapa, and that it was ten-past-eleven we were leaving, and we had ages for dinner. And to reshuffle things into our daypacks, out of the backpacks we found faithfully waiting in room 602. A minute later Tuan called our room again to say that he had made a mistake again, that he had read the date (23:10) accidentally, and that we were leaving at 8.30pm to catch the train at 9.15pm.
We unadventurously walked around the corner to the very same buffet restaurant we had our introductory dinner at, and filled up with rice, and bought bananas from a lady on the street.
In a larger taxi we found our way over to the Ha Noi station, walked through the tiny perfunctory departure hall, and over several sets of tracks and around other trains to find ours. We had begun to see some of the same faces, from other tour groups, at the same places. There was one lady, ‘scarf lady’, who always had a scarf perfectly set around her throat like Angelina.
‘It’s like they think they have to be wearing a scarf to be on holiday’, says Alice.
‘Look at me, I’m in the wild’, says Alice.
‘I have my scarf perfectly draped’, she continues.
‘Wild,’ she whispers, with accompanying exotic hand gestures. ‘Wild!’
So as we walked around behind one train to cross a set of tracks, we came across scarf lady with one foot in a hole, splayed over the stones, having falled down. I am ashamed to admit to a giggle or two.
Just as Luan and Chu had told us it would be, the cabin of our train to Sapa was really quite nice, and we laid ourselves out and went to sleep as soon as possible, the only mishap being when the lights and power shut down in our cabin, coincidentally just as I plugged in the laptop to see if charging of the battery would actually occur.
Greg
