Ha Long Bay: Cat Ba Castaways.

A lagoon in one of the islands in the Cat Ba Archipelago. 

I left Hanoi with Lars, my new German companion, and we took the public bus to Cat Ba island, in the Ha Long Bay area. I'd decided to head to Cat Ba on a bit of a whim. I had little information, aside from a brief report from a British couple I had encountered and quizzed who said it was nice, and the fact that everyone else in Hanoi were taking organised tours for two nights boat booze cruising in Ha Long Bay, for an extortionate $120. From Hanoi backpackers tend to make trips to Ha Long Bay, or Sapa, a place to trek in the hills of northern Vietnam. Sapa sounded good, but the weather was wet and having just trekked the Tiger Leaping Gorge the week before, I felt it may have been similar but with worse weather, so I gave it a miss. We took two public buses and then a boat and another bus to arrive in Cat Ba town, and there were about 8 backpackers altogether making the same independent journey. We all got along pretty well, clearly having similar outlooks to preferring the public transport to the private organised tours. 

We arrived by nightfall, and took a twin room in a hotel for $5 each, with a view over the bay. Two girls from London, Elly and Camille, who'd made the same journey from Hanoi also checked into the same hotel, and we spent the following two days as a four. 

The view from my hotel room.

We weren't sure exactly what to do on Cat Ba, but I suggested hiring some kayaks ourselves and going off exploring the islands and coves, and the group went along with this. We paddled through a fishing village, dogs ran along planks barking as we passed, and it was great to witness this way of life from the water. People nodded or waved as we passed, and fishing boats sped in and out to the open sea. We floated through a small cave to explore a lagoon the other side, before deciding to paddle off and find a deserted beach somewhere. We spotted a few strips of white sand around, and headed for the one which looked the most isolated. 

Ready for kayaking.

Paddling through the fishing village.

I decorated my boat with some flowers found floating in the bay.

Within two minutes of landing on the beach I was off collected materials that I could do something with, and within five minutes everyone was pitching in. It was never my intention to come and play castaways, maybe it was subconsciously, but it just seemed to happen. Nevertheless my new friends kindly indulged my fantasies and we had soon enough bamboo, frayed rope and rotting plastics to make something with. We put a little shelter together, that was more symbolic than practical, as we couldn't collect enough driftwood materials to finish it off. I would've organised a scouting party to raid other beaches but we didn't have time. Next on my agenda was fire, and it took a few attempts to get anything to catch. We tried using receipts from our wallets as the initial ignition, but this was useless. The final attempt of Chinese money and dried grasses from the rocks were the best cocktail for combustion, and eventually, after much huffing, puffing and stinging eyes, I had fire. As soon as I had fire, it was time to leave, if we wanted to make it back before dark. My behaviour that afternoon has earned me the nickname 'Robinson', from Lars.

Lars and I making fire.

Lars, Camille, me and Elly in our four star shelter.

I'm a fire starter, a twisted fire starter.

The following day we took an excursion out on a boat to visit a number of places in Ha Long Bay area. There were perhaps a dozen of us on board, a mix of nationalities, but all European backpackers. First we motored through the fishing village we had paddled through yesterday, and this time I was able to take some pictures, having left my camera in dry safety the day before. We visited a cave, which was full of semi fossilised coral, it once having been underwater, and then scrambled up rocks to get a view over a blue lagoon. After lunch on board the boat we kayaked again, but this time they were double kayaks, and I shared with Alex from Paris, and I was pleased he was competent and we powered through the waves. We went through a number of caves, and explored a tranquil lagoon. We were ahead of the group and spotted a Giant Black Squirrel in an overhanging branch, and watched this monkey sized creature forage for food until others approached and the squirrel was scared higher.

Ha Long Bay landscape, a bit like Yangshuo, China.

Fishing village.

The morning's catch.

Hot fisherman's wife does the washing.

Waterworld.

The fishing village.

In the cave.

Lars and I up a peak.

One of the hundreds of islands. 

Back on the boat we passed the beach which had been our castaway home, the tide was up and I could see through my telephoto lens that our shelter had been washed into the sea. Good job we didn't sleep there like I had fantasised. We moored up in a place with a small pretty beach and did some swimming, I snorkelled for two minutes, and saw some soft coral and two fish, but there was nothing much to see and visibility not great. We jumped off the roof of the boat half a dozen times, and had a pleasant afternoon. We even got a vague glimpse of the sun as it set as we returned to harbour. Back on dry land we played some street football with the local kids until we were sweating and panting, and spent the evening playing pool and table football in the same bar as we had been in the night before.

Secluded beach for swimming,

Nice sailboat in the bay.

Party boat full of Bantersaurus Rex's.

Sunset.

Good Morning Vietnam! Hanoi-oi culture shock.

Hanoi residents exercising around the lake at dawn. 

Hanoi is a jungle. Motorbikes swarm like mosquitoes, their horns never cease as they weave through the pedestrians, forced to walk in the road as the pavements have been taken as parking spaces for other motorbikes. A wiry mess of overhead cables wrap around posts like vines on trees, and the colonial French architecture looks rustic and charming as it slowly decays. It feels very different to China, the European flavour still lingers in Vietnam, and the people smile, everywhere.

Hanoi's old quarter.

Jungle city.

Bikes and pedestrians share the road. 

Crossing the road. Just walk, they'll go around you.

Cables like vines in the canopy.

Everything gets transported by bike.

It took me a few days to get used to Hanoi, it's a slight change in pace from China, and a different kind of chaos. One thing that was immediately noticeable, and would take me some time to get used to and accept, was the number of foreigners here. I'd enjoyed often being the only stray in the village, being the novelty for the locals and feeling like I was on a little adventure. Now I was just another tourist. I was a tourist of course in China and elsewhere but I often saw so few others that I wasn't reminded of the fact. It felt like everyone was in Hanoi, and most of them I didn't like. There were lots of middle aged, or early retired people, looking slightly hostile and cautious clutching their money belts and wearing their zip-off gore tex trousers. They would be driven around the city by the bicycle men, and they looked like giant fat babies sat in pushchairs, snapping away on DSLRs with the settings still on auto. The worst people though, by far, were the young. People my age. Eurgh. Just awful.

Bikes, pointy hats and backpackers are the first three things you notice. 

That first evening I'd gone out for dinner on the pavement with the guys from Finland I'd met on the train, as I'd bumped into them at lunch when I was out exploring, and arranged to meet up later that day. After eating we went for a beer in the main hostel in town, Hanoi Backpackers. It felt like a bad trip on hallucinogens. The place was heaving with vests and haircuts, girls backpacking with heels and hair straighteners, and the guys dressed by the T4 On the Beach stylists, and although are 'top lads with epic bants and bollock slapping pranks', have fuck all to say. It was Hollyoaks. It was Magaluf. It was detestable. Moronic sound-bytes of conversation were muffled by moronic chart music. It didn't feel like Vietnam, it felt like Cheltenham, and I wanted to punch the Essex twat trying to drag us along on a bar crawl, square in his whitened teeth. A whooping crowd left the bar to go on their bar crawl of watered down luminescent vodka shots; I watched the conga line of cunts disappear into the night. This was one of the biggest culture shocks I've experienced on the road so far. Not Mongolian traditions or Japanese isolation, but my own culture, it was looking in a mirror and seeing a monster reflected.

I left with the Fins to find somewhere else to have a drink. We hopped around a couple of places drinking 30p beers, I guess you could say we were doing a bar crawl of our own, and we were no different to the mass of backpackers who had so wound me up earlier on the evening. But we were different. I'm not saying we were better. But really, we were. We met some local girls who invited us to join them in a place that was staying open later, and we needed no convincing. The police were shutting bars down, probably to solicit bribes from the bar owners to stay open, and it was a bit of a game of cat and mouse as we waited around the corner for the police to leave before the late night bar reopened and we could continue the night. The bar was in some kind of shack, in some kind of swamp, down on the river. It felt rather Apocalypse Now, but they refused to play any Wagner. We stayed, drinking, dancing and talking until it closed. None of the 'banter brigade' from earlier were there, just a slim handful of foreign faces, and the rest locals, a good mix.

It had been an interesting first day, I was liking Vietnam, but the numbers of tourists was just going to take some getting used to, I wasn't used to sharing. The rest of my days bleed into one. I went for walks exploring the old town, but I'm not shopping for anything and even cheap shops with bargains in are useless to me. I spent some time hiding away, watching episodes on my laptop, as I eased into Vietnam. I went to the War Museum, which was ok but a bit disappointing. They had some tanks and aircraft outside, but inside I thought was lacking, there wasn't too much information so I barely learnt anything, and what information there was, was amusingly biased. It was all about the 'Vietnamese heroes bravely wiping out the enemy', and a helmet full of bullet holes had the caption 'Evidence of the failure of the French'. Amusing, yes. Informative, not really. Considering how big the war was, I thought they didn't have much. One of the exhibits was a Casio calculator from the 90s, I had the same one for GCSE maths, enthralling stuff. At least mine had interesting tip-ex graffiti.

A typical scene.

I recognised this from the Hanoi level on Call of Duty.

One of the captured planes on display.

A sculpture made from wreckage from shot down aircrafts.

Outside the War Museum.

I wandered down through the government district and went by Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, I'm not sure if you can go in, but you couldn't when I was there. I sat and had a rest when I was approached by some young looking university students, who said they were learning English and could I be their homework. I was mindful of scams but agreed to it, and they filmed me on their phones being interviewed by them about topics such as healthy eating and kids playing video games. It entertained me for 15 minutes.

The quieter government district. 

Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. 

Just a train running through the neighbourhood.

Mildly arousing mannequin shop.

I wasn't sure what else there was to do in Hanoi, there were a couple of museums but they didn't sound appealing, so I didn't end up doing too much of substance. I wanted to extend my pre-booked three night stay in the hostel by a night, but they were fully booked and so put me in their sister hostel around the corner and told me I could settle my bill there. I ended up in a plush four bed room for the same price of $6. When I came to check out the next day, I mentioned I'd been transferred from their other place and owed three nights there, but the guy clearly didn't hear me, so I had three nights bed, breakfast and drinks for free.

Across the rooftops of Hanoi. 

In my second room in Hanoi I met Lars, a German one month into his year long travels, having left his job as a camera salesman in Germany. We got on well and decided to travel to Cat Ba island together, next to Halong Bay, and although he only had a two week visa, it seemed our plans, or lack of them were similar and we may end up travelling through the country a bit together.

Leaving China.

Just as China rushes, I rushed out of China. After hitch-hiking to Lijiang with my Tiger Leaping companions, I had 24 hours in the city to rest my weary legs and organise my journey into Vietnam. I bought my train tickets, I'd be doing back-to-back trains for 30 hours, firstly to Kunming, a few hours wait there and then another half day to Nanning, where I'd be able to get a ticket to Hanoi. 

Lijiang has a beautiful, quaint and picturesque old town, with cobbled streets, stone bridges spanning clean open waterways, and old-style Chinese  architecture. It's a tourist mecca however, and nothing about it felt genuine, it may as well have been a part of Disneyland. I had to navigate across this vast area of shops and cafes to find the ticket booking office, located in what I now find more traditional Chinese;  busy boulevards, scruffy pavements and nondescript commercial property, with none of the charm of the old town, but the modern town was probably older than the so-called 'old town'. Finding my way through the cobbled streets was difficult. I barely saw a road name or street sign, and the layout was a warren of shops I had little interest in. I cynically thought that the lack of signs was a ploy by the town planners to keep tourists lost and spend unnecessary time amongst the shops. I eventually emerged the other side of the maze and got my tickets. The rest of the afternoon I spent relaxing in the hostel and writing the previous blog, before my train left in the evening.

Lijiang old own.

A more traditional Naxi woman walks through the town filled with Chinese tourists.

Quiet courtyards and old style architecture. 

I wandered to the bus stop in plenty of time to catch my train. I waited for nearly 30 minutes and no bus came. I was aware of some Chinese around me with luggage who were also waiting for a bus that wasn't coming, so I grouped together with them and we shared a taxi to the modern and clean station. In the station I met Tom, a guy from Suffolk I'd met in the Tiger Leaping Gorge two days previously, so we had a beer and took the same train to Kunming. My carriage was a double decker, the first time I had been on one and it was quite impressive, and I found I had a soft sleeper when I thought my ticket was for a hard sleeper. I slept all the way to Kunming, and arrived when the sky was murky blue as the first light of day was just over the horizon. Tom and I had a couple of hours until our connecting trains, though we were going to different places, so we took breakfast in a Chinese fast food restaurant, and then idled away the time in the for once quiet departure lounge. 

Dawn in Kunming departure lounge.

I slept for much of the train to Nanning, there's little else to do on these trains but doze and be rocked to a lower level of consciousness, where thoughts can form more freely and take on a direction of their choosing. I'd enjoyed travelling around China by railway, apart from one journey they'd all been comfortable, fairly relaxing and sometimes a nice way to meet local people. I arrived in my final Chinese city at midnight, and had booked a hostel five minutes walk from the station and one that was easy to find by foot. I settled in and stayed up late online, not feeling tired having snoozed for most of the day and night before. 

The next morning I met Petra, a girl from Prague who had no experience of China, so she came with me to buy a train ticket and a walk around town. Petra was a classical pianist, and was heading to Beijing to take the Trans-Mongolian railway home. She found China cold at around 16C, Siberia is currently -40C, so it was about to get a whole load worse for her. We had some lunch in a restaurant and an explore of the city, it didn't seem any different from any other Chinese mega-city, the same scruffy commercialism and endless flow of people. I did notice I was being looked at more in Nanning though, not many travellers come here and so I assume we were more of a novelty than in other places.

Nanning.

Street crossing in Nanning.

Old Chinese men playing mahjong, which involves pieces similar to dominoes or rummikub. 

After exploring the neighbourhood, which was fun and interesting as always, but at the same time offering nothing spectacular, we returned to the hostel to wifi to our hearts content. I had a couple of hours to pass before heading to the train station to take the six o'clock to Hanoi.

In the waiting room I didn't spot any other foreigners taking the train, and I was expecting some as quite a few people enter Vietnam this way from China. After boarding the train I met a foreigner to talk to in the smoking bit between the carriages; Ilkka. Somehow I'd failed to spot three guys from Finland in the departure lounge, but maybe they'd been hiding under their hoods. I was taking a hard sleeper, and sharing my compartment with some social Chinese, including Carrie, who was from Shanghai and spoke pretty good English, as she worked for the British Arcadia Group. We had to get off the train at both sides of the border, about an hour apart, for the usual passport and customs checks and it was as straightforward as it could be. 

Looking down from my top bunk, my last train in China.

The train arrived in Hanoi at a pre dawn hour, perhaps 5am. The streets were asleep and the sky showed no sign of day, but the stillness in the air indicated it wasn't far away. I took the bus with the Chinese from my carriage into the city centre, and not having any small Vietnamese notes from the ATM I visited, Carrie paid my bus fare, which may have been 15pence or so. We got off by the lake in the old quarter, the blue-grey dawn made it look like the city was underwater; the area was busy with people exercising or getting ready for the day and I set about finding my hostel.

Taking the local bus in Hanoi.