Haiphong – Cat Ba Island - a tale of woe...

We soon discovered that there isn't much going on in Haiphong. We found a cheap hotel, a noodle restaurant and whiled away the evening. The next morning we headed to the ferry terminal and jumped on a ferry to Cat Ba island... it wasn't straight forward, nothing seems to be straightforward here, but we managed to arrive within a couple of hours. Unfortunately we didn't see any of the scenery that Halong Bay is famous for, but hey you can't always win in life... we began to wonder if we'd ever start winning in Nam. Again there wasn't much going on in Cat Ba town... as it was off-season every building seemed to be under construction and it was pretty dead :-( We were a little miserable at this stage, but did cheer up after a stroll along the waterfront, a few beers and a beautiful sunset.
All we wanted was an adventure! We decided to book a ticket back to Hanoi via Halong Bay and we were told that it would take only three hours – awesome!

The next morning we boarded a bus with a group of other tourists and headed to catch the ferry. We ended up in a junk boat (old fashioned Vietnamese boat) on what was part of a tour. We enjoyed the boat ride very much and at last got to see the beautiful Halong Bay with its 3,000+ islands. Magnificent scenery - the islands just seem to rise up out of nowhere.
Half way through we had to change boats and ended up on a different tour – pretty confusing and by this time we realised that we may not be getting back to Hanoi within 3 hours.

On reaching Halong City, and dodging about a million sales people, we were told that we would have to wait for the rest of the group to eat their buffet lunch. It would take 40 minutes we were told. We waited for an hour and a half for the group to finish... then we had to wait for the bus driver to eat. By this point it was 2pm (we had planned to be back by 11.30am) and we hadn't eaten anything. We boarded the bus pretty p-d off and headed for Hanoi, via a cousin's pottery shop for half an hour, and arrived back at 4pm. Our plan to catch the night train down south that day was pretty much out of the window and we were so angry and the whole experience that we decided we wanted to leave Vietnam immediately. If they had only told us at the travel agent that the journey would take 8 hours, rather than lying to us and telling us 3 hours we would have been ok – it's just the constant lying, no respect, not giving you a straight answer and stopping by all the shops and restaurants that gets to us.

We booked into a hotel, another issue arose – our bed sheets were all dirty. They hadn't changed them from the last person who slept there! We asked for them to be changed which they did... by turning the pillow cases inside out and leaving us with no top sheet, just a dirty quilt. Then... wait for it... the little man looks at Alex and holds out his hand “tip for me! tip for me!” We just couldn't believe it and started laughing, the man was laughing too, until we told him "no tip!" (Hanoi Spirit House – not recommended if you like clean rooms!)

We looked into crossing the border then and there into Laos, but were told the bus journey would be 20-22 hours long... a bit of a nightmare, so we decided to reconsider, give Nam another chance and book a sleeper train down south to Hue.

The next day we took a tuktuk to the market area in the old town, we were strolling around taking in the sights when I felt a sharp tug on the side of my daypack. I turned round quickly to see a small Vietnamese guy in a black jacket, hands in pockets right behind me, at that point trying to walk past me. I confronted him – I won't repeat what I said cos my parents read this blog – he just stared at me. Al was way ahead of me and I shouted to get him to come over to help me, but by this point the guy had walked off. A side pocket of my rucksack was open but thankfully nothing missing. We've never had this in any other country we've been in! It's so annoying because we've been really really careful, but they're pretty sneaky over here so from now on I wear my day pack or handbag on my front. We walked to the lake in the old town which is home to some legendary turtles that no one ever sees. It was a sunny day and Al was talking to a caretaker of the temple at the lakeside. The caretaker pointed to the lake and showed Al where the turtles were sunbathing – pretty cool! This means we will have good luck for the rest of our lives!
Maybe it means that Vietnam will start to treat us more kindly...