Back to Sapa (26th October)
When the rooster started telling everyone to wake up, I started waking up.
Actually there were more than a few roosters, and with not enough hands to strangle them all, I took the other road and got out of bed to take some pictures. It was a bit foggy so I just wandered around the homestay area and snapped this and that. When I crept back up the stairs and pushed through the mosquito net again, somebody was just starting to wake up, so I laid down and waited around ’til about 7.30. Breakfast was to be at 8am, downstairs; and around the outside table, set upon the thin concrete veranda, we waited while the owners bought out coffee or tea, then a stack of pancakes, and drizzly honey, and bananas, and then a plate of apple and pear slices. Almost all of it got eaten.
Nobody was much interested in a shower so we set off along the path through the village, turning almost immediately up the face of the hill, and hiked up to where the mud trails started. Clay has a way of being uselessly thick when rained upon, but once again we were lucky, and apart from the occasional slippery spot we had no problems at all. Xuan (whom I mistakenly referred to as Suan with an S previously) had a great time pointing out which flowers were poisonous and could be taken for insomnia.
Up the ridges of the valley and down the orange paths we picked our way over the driest-looking spots. Just like yesterday Alice was followed by several purple-clad women, while I trotted ahead, or fell behind while taking pictures. The river followed us down the middle of the valley for the first half of our walk, until we turned up another hill and disappeared into the bamboo forest. Less sun was getting through the thick layers of bamboo and the path underfoot was far muddier, but that just made it fun. After a couple of half slips, we began to see how it would be annoying to have to deal with that all day, as the other group would have had to.
But as we filtered through the forest we could hear a waterfall, coming closer around each corner, until suddenly the forest went away and down the side of the mountain there was a 2m wide path cut; down this path came racing a man dragging a log on a rope. Basically what you do is get the logs down the mountain by running ahead of the log; seems pretty safe to me. Down the logging track a hundred metres or so we came to the waterfall, and everyone sat down to have a rest, have a look at the serenity, and eat an orange.
By now it was maybe 11am; or even 11.30am but not very warm, and a bit of a trickle of rain was starting up, even though it later died away due to mass unpopularity.
Further down the logging track, which was a pretty steep slope, we came to a bridge across the river, and a small shop. The Purple-clad ladies were leaving us so Alice caved in again and bought another bracelet and a little jingly bell thing to go on her backpack, which I thought was fair because we didn’t need them to help us along nearly so much as the other group would have. But it’s still nice to buy something small.
We followed the river for a little while after our break, but eventually had to turn back up the hill, and back into the steep and occasionally rocky tracks, which you can imagine presented Xuan with absolutely no difficulty whatsoever. At a point where a stream down into the river ran under the trail, he pointed out a rustic outdoor toilet, set romantically above the water.
‘This is why I tell tourists some of the times, not to swim in this river.’
The rustic toilet belonged to a Red Dzai villager, whose house we were now going to visit. The man himself is one of the local magicians, which is roughly equivalent to being a civil celebrant and an interpersonal counsellor combined. When someone is sick or needs a decision made, it’s up to the magician to call forth the ancestors and see if they can help. The magician would also help decide whether two people are suitable for marriage and so forth. I did ask Xuan whether the magician would be able to concoct any type of potion which might make a woman change her mind about getting married, but he pretended not to know what I meant.
The typical Red Dzai house is much larger than a Hmong house, and has a concrete floor in some of the rooms. And a satellite dish in the eves. The other thing about being a magician is you have to be able to speak and write Mandarin, because all of the scrolls on the altar naming various ancestors are written in Mandarin. Before the Vietnamese language was put together by some Europeans with nothing better to do, most of the people in Vietnam spoke Chinese.
In the attic of the house they store preserved or non-perishable food, and the bedrooms are basically all one room. But they had electricity and seemed to be doing alright. Xuan says that when a Hmong person sells a pig at the market or something like that, they’ll get drunk, fall onto their horse and let the horse take them back to their village. Once on a tour he thought he found a dead person in the forest, but he was just passed out.
Meanwhile the average Red Dzai is more inclined to save the money for something; spend it on the house, or his daughter’s wedding, or what-have-you.
Back down the hill we came to another bridge back across the river, which meant that we had nearly walked as far as the main road and the bus back to Sapa, and a slightly more insistent rain had begun. We stopped for a little look at the river and the rocks before continuing on up hill, looking back regularly down the path and at the magnificent valley. It wasn’t very far back up to the main road, and in the bus it wasn’t very far back to Sapa (10km). We were back in our comfy, damp, cannot-possibly-dry-any-washing room by about 1.30, but we were starving and went walking up the main street for lunch. The place we stopped was actually very nicely decorated but that didn’t mean we couldn’t get lunch for about 70,000VND.
The afternoon was given over to catching up on travel journals and photo editing, and again we wandered not very far up the main street for dinner. Alice ordered a steak sandwich but got something more like rissole sandwich, but the price was right.
You buy from me (25th October)
A very great and fortunate thing occurred on the morning of our trek; or failed to happen.
There was no rain.
There was fog as we met our local guide Suan, turned right, and walked out of Sapa, along a road for the first two kilometres and then onto a wide dirt track with motorcycle ruts carved in and regular ‘land mines’ planted by the local water buffaloes.
Along the way Hmong girls in Indigo dyed clothes, aged from 6 to 66, baskets on their backs full of bracelets, wallets, wall hangings and whatnot, walk with you and play the ‘You buy from me’, game.
‘You like a bracelet? You buy from me.’
‘I’ve got one, see here on my wrist. So no thank you.’
‘This one nicer. You buy from me.’
‘Maybe later.’
‘Yes maybe later, you remember me, you buy from me. What’s your name, where you from?’
And so on like that.
It must be that I look like I don’t need any help walking, but soon enough Alice had four or more girls, none older than 12 or 13, the youngest being 8, following along and talking about how they learned all their English from following tourists, and making delicate little sculptures by interlocking flower heads into curled up fern leaves, and bending fern fronds around to make laurel wreaths. Their English is frightfully good, and with a laurel wreath set on my head more than a few people suggested a resemblance to Julius Caesar, and advised me not to go to Rome next March, or if I had to, to particularly not go to the Senate.
Dry paths, for relatively dry they were, were a luxury we could not afford to forego by even so much as uttering or contemplating the words ‘Thank God we’re not getting rained on.’ We kept waiting for the hard part to start, but so long as due attention was paid to the clay patches and one’s feet went in the footholds, both up and down slopes were negotiated quite safely. On the walking path we came down and around the edge of a valley, where a concrete water channel followed the hill-curve, and then walked up and over the valley edge, into one of the most beautiful places we’ve been on this Earth. The valley is home to the local Hmong people’s village (and their rice terraces).
I’ll say no more about the valley, and hope that our pictures can do justice.
Before lunch we visited a traditional Hmong household, with a dirt floor and animals running around, and we sat with the old man in charge and learned about the local wedding customs, how many goats and so forth you have to provide as dowry, and other amusing technicalities. The ‘wife’ is bought to the house of the ‘husband’, locked in a room for three days, and if she doesn’t want to eat anything they cook for her, there will be no marriage.
Down past the river we came to a bridge, next to which were some large huts where we stopped for lunch. A group of elderly Japanese men sat at another table with their cameras, passing them around so each could have a look. Were they pros? Or were they not? Lunch was two salad and cheese buns (Alice’s had fried chicken in it), bananas, and oranges (which I put in my backpack), and then we took off through the buzzing field of Indigo girls, capitulating on the way to the extent of 10,000 VND for two thin coloured ribbon bracelets. Up the other side of the valley we walked on wider paths, chatting to another tour group of Australians and listening to Suan talk about how there are three events for these tribespeople; getting married (and paying for the wedding), buying a buffalo, and buying a house. Buffaloes, however, are not cheap: USD 800-900 for a good one.
At about 3pm we were amazed to see signs saying Ta Van village, which was were we going. We had made it, with very little mudsliding, life-risking, or getting hilariously filthy involved. It was a let-down, and a relief. Our homestay house actually looked kind of like how you would picture a village schoolhouse, and Suan, who also teaches in a school as well as being a guide, explained that Dzai houses always have the kitchen on the right. Upstairs in the attic we found rows of beds around the banister rail, over which you looked down into the lounge room/dining room/family room/entrace room, etc. You get the point; it’s the multi-purpose room with the altar for ancestor worship.
It’s considered bad luck (and improper) to sit with your back to the altar, or to take photos of said.
Alice: After we arrived at the homestead Tuan procured a large bag of fresh Guava’s from some of the local people he knew. I have never tried fresh Guava before – but I love Guava juice. They are small roundish fruit. that turn from green to yellow-ish when ripe. The yellow ones were beautiful. There was a hard rim of flesh near the skin which was quite tart, and then much more softer flesh absolutely filled with little hard seeds which tasted like the guava I knew and loved from drinking the juice. Can you even get fresh Guava in New South Wales? I hope so – it was lovely.
Greg: After floating about upstairs for a little while, we walked across the road to a ‘bar’ and played two extremely lengthy games of pool, delayed by how badly we were all playing and by how many separate dints and warps there were in the table. Also we couldn’t turn around without one particular old lady trying to ell Alice a blanket, handbag, or wall hanging, or something. No excuse would sate her, although to be honest she was having a bit of a giggle as well. If I said the shirt wasn’t my colour, she’d pull out a bluer one. If Alice said something was too heavy to carry, and her bag was too heavy already, she pointed at me and said I had muscles and could carry it. So then Alice said I was too lazy to carry it, and I made the mistake of saying I wasn’t lazy. And so on, and so forth. By 6pm (dinner time) we had only just finished the second game, and we sat around the outside table at our homestay and played cards while dinner cooked inside. A long day’s walk needs a big cold beer I mean a filling dinner, which is what we got: rice, a plate of steamed greens, another of cabbage, spring rolls, tofu in a tomato sauce, several fried eggs, as well as pork and chicken fried with vegetables, not to mention a few small glasses of rice wine to toast with the owner of the house: a dignified 50-something man, who smiled a lot, and had many certificates on the wall from the Government, apparently commemorating his various forms of service.
We ate like KINGS.
And then we played cards; Suan learns quickly, and once he knew the rules he proved to be just as fiendish as he was joyful. If someone could not beat a jack, and picked up a pile of cards, next time around he would play the king, having paid attention to what was in the pile, and motion for you to pick up this pile as well, knowing there was no other way. Tuan, as an Intrepid leader and frequent customer of overnight trains, knows every card game in the book, and I for one would like to see a death-match game of poker between himself and Ann. In a steel cage, with no food or water.
At 10pm we retired, slipped under our mosquito nets, and went to sleep quickly on our thin but comfortable beds in the warm attic.
Greg and Alice
Rainy day Sapa (24th October)
At 6am (no christ no no not that again please let us sleep) we had to get off the train not at Sapa but at Lao Cai, which is a little way down the road from Sapa, and is also the end of the railway line in that direction.
We had our alarm clocks set for 5.30am but the train staff did not know this and felt the most helpful thing they could do would be to play some loud, scratchy, speakers a the edge of their treble range music, to wake everyone up. I don’t know what it was; I don’t want to know what it was, for it also sound like a skipping CD, that it, it was loud, intermittent, and awful.
People back home will by this stage be making small tragic violin motions; oh it must be awful adventuring around on the trains in Vietnam…. tra-la-la let’s put uup a memorial…
So I will save you further griping.
At the station in Lao Cai we were greeted by basically everyone in town, all eager to ask us if we needed a bus ride or had our hotel organised. Somebody said that for the tourist operators it must look basically like a meat market, all fresh off the train. Get the ones with the camera bags first. Or something like that. We got into a minivan with some other people from other countries and trundled out off the tarmac road onto a mixed tarmac/mud/construction site/small landslip road that went up into the hills, and around each corner, it just went further and further up.
And the driver changed down gears as we wound between cliff face and sheer drop into palms and bamboo and stepped rice-terrace hillsides, and a very persistent foggy mist. A real one this time, not the ‘fog’ of Shanghai. Then the driver took us through Sapa, up another hill, and down the entrance way of a hotel that was not the hotel anyone on the bus was going to.
‘Aren’t we all going to the Royal?’ a lady in the front seat piped, as those front-seat people are bound to do eventually.
Vague nods from a tired vanload.
Well, where’s this? If he’s not taking us there I’ll have my ticket back.’
The door of the van opened. A nice lady with a clipboard asked whether anyone wanted to stay at this hotel, whether we just wanted to get out and have a look at the rooms, please sir just have a look, need a hotel room? That type of thing.
An American behind us spoke for everyone when he said,
‘No, we already have a hotel booked, but thank you kindly.’
The driver, who for some reason thought he might be about to unload some bags off the bus, then got back into the van, backed up the slippery slope, did a three point turn with about zero metres to spare on each side while a motorbike coming down the hill waited, and then we drove back into town and pulled up in front of the Royal Sapa Hotel.
Where we could not check in. Of course we couldn’t, it was 8am, and most of the guests wouldn’t yet be awake let alone checked out. Why the hell should they be? I wouldn’t be.
So we went for breakfast up the main road a hundred metres or so, where I began to feel awake again after a liberal application of black coffee, and thoroughly enjoyed my pancakes with lime juice and sugar, while Alice tucked convincingly into a ham and cheese omelette. And a vanilla and cinnamon milkshake. On the walls they had hung various printed pictures of people and places around Sapa, some good and others really superb. Cue the technical debate about whether a picture that big could have come from a 35mm film camera, and can you see the little cross-hatch squares from too much resampling, and so on.
Anyway. Really nice pictures.
We were asked by the hotel to come back at 11.30 and see if there were any rooms available, so on Tuan’s recommendation we had a look around the food and clothing markets set up at the high end of the main street, on the left and right side of the road. Food on the left. Whatnot on the right, leading from the main grassy square down an alley, from whence steps took us back down to the main street. In the time it took me to go into a shop (a tarpaulin) and get stung on the price of a pair of clean white socks, a very dense fog settled in, over, and around everything.
Visibility: 50m.
New socks: priceless.
We had seen in various places shops advertising that they could provide wireless internet, so we figured on exploring Sapa after we came back from the rice terraces, and went back to the hotel at 9.30am to fetch our computer (and power cord) from a backpack. Our plans were dramatically realigned when the nice lady behind the desk said that there was a room available now and would we like it?
‘Is it a double bed room?’
‘All same. One single, one double bed.’
And that is how room 308, and a warm shower, became ours. Alice went to sleep for a bit and I began writing more journals.
At 11.30am, I went downstairs to find Tuan, Adam and Catherine and tell them that we had already managed to check-in, and they should not wait for us. And then a very strange thing happened. Out the large window, in the stairwell between floors three and two, I could see the main street and on the other side of our end of the main street I clearly observed a person looking very much like June, in her short sleeve black wick-sweat-away hiking shirt, walking up the stairs of a hotel. A hotel across the road from ours.
Eh?
The road, I should add, is about 2 metres wide. I wasn’t sure if my eyes were playing tricks until I also clearly observed, in the light of day, Andy and Katie walking up those same steps into the same Mountain View Hotel. So I walked on down, explained what-and-how to our current group, and walked over to surprise our previous group. And surprised they were.
‘Where’s Alice?’
‘Upstairs asleep. If we hadn’t checked-in early, and then come back down to explain, I probably wouldn’t have seen you.’
Turns out they were returning from Sapa after their trek through the rice terraces, and would be leaving town tonight on the 6pm train. The very same thing we would be doing in two days time. They would go through Ha Noi, and out to Ha Long bay and Cat Ba Island, while we trekked through mud and worse. We knew we would arrive back in Hanoi on the same day, and when you look at it that way, we were bound to meet in the middle. I made a plan to meet in one hour for lunch, seeing as they were all checking in and wanted to clean up, and went back upstairs to share the good news.
For lunch we walked a total of 8m up the hill to an Italian restaurant, and had a good minestrone, and a great time catching up on news and happenings. The horror stories from the trek through the rice terraces were not what we needed to hear.
‘It’s the World’s longest mud slide.’
‘Don’t wear anything you don’t want to throw out.’
‘I’m going to buy a new backpack after this because my other one is too muddy to clean.’
‘One of those little ladies that try to sell you things literally saved my life. I was about to go over the edge.’
‘Oh no but it’s fun, you’ll have a great time, you just have to slide down every hill on your bot.’
Yep. Sounds great.
Job done, we resolved to catch up again in Ha Noi, instructed each other to enjoy the coming days, and we went back up to room 308 and spent most of the remaining afternoon watching the rain trickle over everything, and wrote more travel journals. Downstairs, in the WiFi reception zone, we posted everything and sorted pictures in as much as possible before meeting Tuan for dinner at 6.30pm. Up the main road, right-turn up the steps that lead to the back of the market, past the park and along another tree-bordered street, we went into the upstairs part of a restaurant for a Hot Pot.
They bring out a single ceramic electric element, with a deep wide pot on top full of stock, herbs, and some carrots and other similar vegetables. They bring you bowls of chilli, lime, salt, soy sauce, tofu, quail eggs, packet noodles and a bowl to eat out of. They bring you an absolute mountain of choy sum, cabbage, and other vaguely identifiable local green vegetables. You keep feeding the greens in, chuck in some tofu or noodles when you feel like it, and it boils away and makes just about the tastiest concoction you can imagine.
We were full. I’m talking about Christmas-lunch full. And we’d only eaten half of ours. If even. And it was great value for the price, and we anticipated needing every bit of that energy tomorrow morning.
Greg
All hands to the paddles (23rd October)
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
The best day yet… again (22nd October)
Tuesday the 22nd of October was a long day for us, and one of the best in our holiday so far.
About Ha Long city not that much needs to be said; just back of the beach is a long row of restaurants, with a woman out the front of each one waving enthusiastically to tourists. The hotels up on the hill look over the bay, and they compete with each other to have the most garish and slightly non-sensical neon sign. The road leading up to our hotel loops around; on one end you take a sort of shortcut through some alleys, up the hill past a karaoke bar, motorcycles honking past now and then, and turn right, walking past street food vendors who put their plastic chairs under tarpaulins.
On the other end you go the way we went to find breakfast; down the other edge of the same hill, squiggling down to the main roundabout which marks the end of the restaurant strip. Unsurprisingly the same waitress that waved enthusiastically to us last night was standing out the front of the same restaurant this morning; had she slept? do they sleep? – and she recognised us and started up again. I ordered a thing called a ‘bread omelette’, which was a long white bun equipped with two fried eggs and some salad. What we might call a fried egg sandwich.
And then it was back up the winding hill with us.
‘I suppose’, I said, ‘that we should buy some bottles of water? Here, look, water, in this shop here.’
‘If I’m buying them’, says Alice, ‘I’m going to buy them at the top of the hill, cos I’m not carrying them up.’
At 8.45am the group and it’s leader got into a larger taxi and lined ourselves up at the marina, which is back on the road out of town, past the other end of restaurant row. All we knew is that we were for a boat cruise to Cat Ba Island, although we were wondering just how that was going to work out with four people in the group. Turns out it works very well. What happens is this; you get a 24-seat boat, with a big glue sundeck on top and plenty of space in the windowed cabin to leave your bags and yourself lying around out of the sun, and then you go floating out into the bay, watching the small wooden rowing-boats ducking out of the way.
Then you basically set sail for paradise.
Around Cat Ba Island is a large archipelago, although people who have been to Southern China recently would recognise these small islands as the same type of limestone karst formation found around Yangshuo and Guilin. It’s just the same as if Yangshuo were 20m below sea level. Which would be tragic because then we couldn’t move there. So we had a great time swanning around on the boat, sitting quietly up on the sun deck, stopping at a floating fish farm and a deepening stalactite cave along the way. Back on the boat we sat ourselves down inside and had lunch bought to our table, and with a smile too.
The boat continued it’s soft progress through the submerged limestone peaks, while we had a light slumber and digested. And when everyone was ready they pulled up, chucked the anchor out, and we got into our swimming gear.
‘It’s deep enough, yeah?, I asked Tuan.
‘Go ahead. Just jump.’
‘The water’s clean?’
‘Go on. Just jump in the water.’
Sound advice from a man not swimming himself, but good advice is good advice. So I got up on the ledge (what’s the part of hull above the waterline and above the deck called? I’m sure there’s a particular name. Anyone?) Anyway I did a nice big swan dive down into the salty bay. I couldn’t convince Alice to do the same; she walked around to the ladder which the drew ha hung over the edge and lowered herself in. I don’t know how deep the water was; we were maybe 30m from shore and couldn’t see the bottom, so deep enough is my guess.
A couple of laps around the boat were fun, and then we set to treading water for as long as we could, which the women folk found significantly easier, possibly due to their higher ‘truth’ and ‘virtue’ content, which enables them to float better to begin with. If there could be anything more fun than swimming off a boat, I don’t know what it is. But it might be getting a van ride from where the boat moors on Cat Ba Island over to the national park entrance, and then going for a short-ish walk through pretty thick forest up to the top of the hill where there is an old Navy look out post. In the forest there are small monkeys which you may see; or instead of that you can watch your Vietnamese-speaking guide climb the trees, swing through the vines, and generally hop around having a ball and keeping everyone amused. Now there is a man who likes his job.
In the forest is surprisingly dark, and cool, although sweat still leaks out of you and washes off your mosquito repellent, and then the hordes of potential malaria hosts carry you off to their lair where the Grand High Mosquito demands to know your blood type. But if you hear a strange noise, don’t worry; it’s just your native guide giggling after picking one of those flowers that sticks to your shirt when thrown. The best thing to do is pick it off and throw it back. I might have said that the walk was shortish, but most of the last kilometre was up and over rocks, through muddy patches, between trees, and finally up some rusty ladders bolted to the mountain, with bamboo growing all around.
The look out post is at the very top of Ngu Lam peak. I think this one of the higher peaks on Cat Ba Island, maybe the highest. Or anyway, the look out post is definitely the rustiest. As always, the climb to the top is worth it, even though I couldn’t help thinking the next step would be the one that proved too rusty. At the top the guide thought it would be funny to warn me that one of the railings was bit weak by shaking it, and then pulling off a flaking sliver of rust and throwing it toward a monkey that he could hear in the forest down below. Then while we minced our way down the steps he climbed down the inside of the frame.
Why? Because he actually is a monkey.
On the way back we came through a muddier, slipperier short cut path, then sat near the exit drinking coke and giving the mosquitoes a fair chance to bite any of the available unbitten parts of our legs.
The van took us after to back to the main town of Cat Ba port, which like Ha Long city is a marina with a row of restaurants along the bay, and hotels and houses creeping up the hills. We got there just on sunset, dropped our bags in the hotel room which had a balcony and a double bed and which I swore I would never want to leave, and skipped the 150m back down to the water to watch the sunset. Which was gorgeous.
For dinner Tuan took us to one of the waterfront cafes, where they have crabs in a big tank for your selection. Full and happy, we went for a little walk past the jewellery markets peacefully occupying the footpath in front of all the restaurants, then around the bay a bit, where we sat on a bench and talked about what we might or might not do when we get home.
Hanoi to Ha Long City (21st October)
Early in the morning of the 21st of October we were presented with an unusual and urgent problem: finding breakfast.
It was not provided by our hotel.
Even at 7am the street was getting crowded with people selling all manner of trinkets, not to mention the 40,000 motorcycles either zipping past or parked at any available spot on the footpath. We walked for a little while looking for some type of open food cooking venue, but the bakery didn’t have quite what we were looking for. Around the corner there was a fresh food market, where we bought a bag of those tiny bananas and ate a couple of them, and a dragonfruits as well. With something small from the bakery that seemed quite enough, and we stopped for coffee at a cafe. On the menu they had such a thing as bread with honey, so Alice ordered that as a snack but when it came it was quite a large bread roll. That fed two.
Upstairs in the hotel we ate chunks of dragonfruit in between shuffling our bags around, and then left our large backpacks in the room to be collected by the hotel and transferred to a baggage room. Throughout Russia, Mongolia and China we had been shunted around in a long series of minivans; but we were wondering about whether that would be economical for Intrepid with a group of 4 people. Any fears were displaced and set free when the van rolled up in front of us and it was not only a shiny white minivan but a shiny white minivan with an Intrepid logo.
Score!
We spread our stuff out around the van and gassed it out of Hanoi, from the back streets onto a main road and from the main road to a huge interchange and then out across the bridge over the Red River. The ride to Halong City, Tuan said, should be somewher between two and three hours, maybe three and a half with some traffic. We passed through larger towns and small towns and stopped along the way in a rice field to learn some things about the harvesting process and the rice itself. Vietnam is the world’s 3rd largest exporter of rice, for which the farmer at the end gets about 10,000 VND per kilogram. Yes, the farmers do get to work outdoors, but otherwise it’s a thankless task.
By midday we arrived at Halong city where we checked into the ‘Entity Hotel’. Suggestions on a postcard, please… once again I walked into the room and uttered my usual catchphrase: ‘I am never going to leave this room.’ That slightly overstates how nice the hotel rooms have been, but they have been pretty decent, and it’s great to feel like all the money we got together months ago has gone somewhere. We went straight back downstairs for lunch in one of the restaurants along the waterfront, or actually just across the road from the waterfront. Yet again it was filling, cheap, and came with filter coffee.
Having seen the beach we really wanted to go no further, and while Tuan went off to do Tuan-stuff we made straight for the deckchairs on the beach and sat there in the shade for quite some time. Large birds cruised overhead. Ships lined the bay. The palms trees resisted the breeze and we resisted the locals with shoe shine gear who thought they might be able to do something with my beat up Dunlop volleys. With that job done we walked back to the hotel, and lazed around until it felt like dinner time. Along the waterfront we went into a decent looking little restaurant and had simple fried rice and spring rolls, then promenaded onto the beach and along the pier that stretches a little way into the bay. Out there we sat for a while, looking over at the new suspension bridge and cursing the source of the karaoke which carried easily across the water.
With another relatively early morning coming tomorrow, bedtime came around again.
Greg
First real day in Hanoi (20th October)
For some unknown reason we woke up earlier than usual on Monday morning.
We had to check out by midday today anyway, so we just got up at 7am and went upstairs for breakfast. There were a surprising number of people about. Most of them sounded vaguely Australian or American, and I think we can safely say we were the only people under 30. OK 35. OK… 40.
Once again there were too many tasty things to choose from, and once again we went out into the street afterwards and found ourselves a tea and coffee.
Back in the hotel we tidied up our room, and for a giggle I pulled everything out of my bags, laid it out on the bed, and took a photograph, then took the opportunity to put it all back in a sensible order. We wrote another day or two of journal, and eventually confronted the fact that we would have to leave our hotel room. We had looked up the hotel we were going to, and knew that it wasn’t very far from the route we had walked back from the lake. In fact it was just one extra left turn and seemed a bit too easy.
With sadness in our hearts and slow feet we said goodbye to our hotel room, and walked down into the midday heat.
I got about a block before spotting a lady set up on the footpath cooking tofu and noodles with sauce, and decided I was hungry enough to eat that. For some reason these footpath places only have tiny little stools to sit on, so I’m sure I looked a bit stoopid hunched over chop-sticking food into my mouth, but it was tasty and cost 5,000 VND. Bargain.
We only got a little bit lost finding the hotel, and it was because of the reason we suspected: in the Hanoi chapter of the Lonely Planet book it does mention that streets in the Old Quarter change names every two or three blocks. So we reached Hoan Kiem lake, which was obviously too far, and turned around to go back up the next block, where we did indeed find our street and following on from that, our hotel. And we found it without the assistance of the multiple young men who flashed out business cards and asked if we needed a hotel.
The new hotel room, although I should wish to report otherwise, was not as nice as our previous one. Or not as light, anyway. We had a room where the window opened to a view of the interior stairs, and to say that it was like a cave would be unfair to some of the caves I’ve been in. All the same it was still a pretty tidy room, and had working wireless internet.
But with this being our first ‘real’ day in Hanoi we decided it was a good day to get out and see the famous Hoan Kiem lake. Alice stopped at a tofu/noodle place on the footpath for lunch, and had almost the same thing as me for 15,000 VND. There was a bit of light rain but nothing of the monsoon variety which we expected to encounter; actually I’d be pretty disappointed if we left Vietnam without getting trapped in a huge thunderstorm, it seems like part of the charm of the place. As the rain started one of the men hanging around the footpath restaurant went and got a reaching pole, and reached up and got his two parrots in cages down off the electrical wires.
The lake is very green, and has two small pagodas in the middle. One is connected by a bridge, and charges admission, while the other is out on an island of it’s own. On the way around the back of the lake we did indeed walk past the ANZ bank, which was about 200m from where the cab driver dropped us off, but behind quite a few trees. Such a shame.
Mindful of being back at the hotel by 6pm for our next Intrepid group meeting we strolled back in that direction, and were downright shocked to find that a big of pineapple in the old quarter is 30,000 VND, not the 15,000 we were accustomed to paying.
At 6pm we got in the elevator for what we thought would be a very quick meeting, since we had seen on the Intrepid booking sheet when we checked in that there were only two other people in our tour. The two other people turned out to be a brother and sister from Geelong travelling together, just as they had done on previous trips to India as well as Alaska and Canada. So together with our new guide Tuan, Adam and Catherine and ourselves made very short work of the formalities. In fact we set off for dinner at about 6.25pm.
Tuan took us to a restaurant just around the corner where we could pick and choose our dishes from a buffet, and get them warmed up and bought to the table, for a grand total of about 30,00 VND plus whatever you wanted to drink. I couldn’t resist beer and Alice had one of those yoghurt drinks called Lassis, except unlike the ones you get in Indian restaurant this one was sour like buttermilk. Not so much sour as not particularly sweet. Very nice.
Alice: “I can confirm that I am now officially addicted to the Sour Lassi.
Greg: There was not so much to do after dinner except for check some emails and twiddle around in hotel room, and repack our bags so that we could get what we wanted into a small bag to take with us to H Long bay and Cat Ba island. We had to be in the bus at 8.30am the next morning; an early night seemed the thing to do.
Greg
Loafing in Hanoi (17, 18, 19 October)
On the Friday morning, Alice was feeling a lot better and could lash out a bit on breakfast.
That was fortunate because I cannot stress how nice the breakfasts were. And they served different stuff each day; potato salad, three kinds of green beans, bread with butter, tomato salads, tubs of yoghurt or creme caramel (which tasted a bit like salt…?), three or four kinds of fruit, small pancakes, pastries; basically more things than you could have a hope of fitting on one plate. And in among the pastries one morning we had these little soft-dough fried parcels, smaller than a doughnut, but filled with custard.
Post-breakfast we would go and try one of the other nearby cafes, slowly working out which one had the best coffee.
On Friday, we spent a lot of time picking photos for the website and working out how to get the trick-functions in photoshop to automatically convert, resize or even name pictures for us, thus saving a lot of time in future. Hong Kong had been a shopping paradise so I started daydreaming about new lenses for our camera and looked these up on the internet.
Eventually, we did have to leave the hotel room and do something; we wanted to find a bank to cash our traveller’s cheques, so after lunch in the restaurant next door we walked around the block trying the various banks, which we noted would be closed on Saturday and Sunday. After three or four shakes of the head we went back to ask the hotel, who advised to go to the ANZ bank over near Hoan Kiem lake. They even called a taxi for us.
Along the way we watched where we going, and how far, and decided we could quite easily walk ourselves back and skip the fare, which was only 18,000 VND anyway. We couldn’t find the ANZ bank but the driver seemed to be pointing that it was around the place somewhere. Instead we went into the closes bank where the commission was slightly higher and walked out with our next Intrepid local payment organised.
The walk back from the lake was fun, what with all the tiny stores selling random stuff, like a shop full of teddy bears and another full of pots and pans, and only those things. Furthermore we went past a quality bakery and so that was afternoon tea sorted; custard scroll and a chocolate sponge cake slice for 10,000 VND. And on the way back we picked up our clean washing. Nice.
On Friday night we spoiled ourselves with dinner in the hotel restaurant, and once again we were almost the only people there, and once again we got our corner table with the best view. I had a fried rice (for people who asked), while Alice thoroughly enjoyed the beef noodle soup. The menu said something about Bananas fried in rum and sugar, but apparently they didn’t have any that night.
(sigh)
OK… 18th October: Saturday morning.
On saturday, having had two days of stuffing around, we began to seriously consider trying to get our travel journal up to date. But given the opportunity and the time, we decided first to update some of the engine parts that keep the website running. This meant backing stuff up and changing some things around. It’s easy but takes a little while. Also we put some descriptions on all the old galleries which didn’t have any descriptions, organised all the galleries from each country into albums, and other stuff like that which we have been wanting to do. It was fun.
During the day we also went on a great lunch adventure, which began with buying pineapple from the pineapple lady on the street corner to tide us over, moved on to buying some snacks from a bakery while we were walking, continued with us sitting down for tea and coffee to consider where else we could go, and ended with us deciding that we nearly full with snacks anyway. And then on the way back to the hotel we found an old lady on the street selling what we thought might be deep fried potato scallops, but they turned out to be filled with mashed banana. Which is much much better.
For dinner on Saturday night we went wandering the neighbourhood, and I twice nearly slipped over walking on the edge of the road. There is usually an interesting combination of things in a Vietnamese gutter, and most of them are slippery. Eventually we found a small restaurant at the edge of the West lake where got rice-paper rolls with salad leaves, bean sprouts and mint in them, and a dipping sauce on the side. Alice had beef in hers, and also a fun time explaining to the staff that I didn’t want beef in mine. It was cheap and filling, and with a couple of glasses of beer it was just what we needed.
After that: 19th October. Sunday.
Sunday morning we put even more effort into catching up on the old journals, but upon arriving in Hanoi we were something ridiculous like 17 days behind… so if any of the entries in October seem slightly hashed over (for instance this one), please send complaints to the usual address. On Sunday Alice really couldn’t stretch herself as far as leaving the hotel room, so I went out for coffee on my own, tried the third cafe along the street from or hotel, and finally confirmed my initial impression; the first cafe was the best, and we would be going there again tomorrow.
I was of course quite satisfied that our room had cable TV because it meant I’d be able to watch the Chinese Grand Prix in peace and quiet. After the coffee errand I also fetched pineapple from the pineapple lady, and went looking for the fried banana lady but she must have been having the day off.
On Sunday night we once again could not resist the temptation of room service, and ordered more fried with vegetables, tofu in a superb tomato-coriander sauce, garlic bread (with smashed instead of minced garlic), and a fruit platter or dragon fruit, watermelon, and something else which had green skin (shaped like a lime) but looked and tasted kind of like mandarin. Then I went out take some pictures of the lake, and was only interrupted by an odd noise from about 5 metres away. I identified this noise as a man going no #1 in the lake.
And that’s about all we did.
Greg
