Cat Ba Island and Lan Ha Bay

Cat Ba Island and Lan Ha Bay

One of Vietnam's most famous attractions is Northern Vietnam is the collection of thousands of karst mountains rising out of the ocean in Ha Long Bay and the surrounding area. No guide book goes without mentioning it, and tours to the area are seen at every turn when navigating the old streets of Hanoi.

Although the area undeniably looked beautiful, I'd initially decided I'd give it a miss this time around as the weather in the area is supposed to typically be very cold and misty, with people saying you sometimes can't even see anything.

However, after arriving in Hanoi, which had been blessed with blue skies and warm sunshine, and looking at the optimistic weather forecasts for the following days, I decided to give the area a shot.

The most popular way to travel Ha Long Bay is through a boat tour on a junk boat, which generally takes you on an overnight trip on the bay in a luxury cabin with meals included. However, my budget prevented me from participating in the more luxury tours and I'd read some pretty worrying reviews about the more budget cruises on offer. I'd also heard from some friends that Ha Long Bay is so popular with tourists now that the water can sometimes be pretty polluted, with garbage floating around in it.

With this in mind, I decided to do a slightly more independent kind of travel and instead go to Cat Ba Island which is located a little south of  Ha Long Bay. On Cat Ba, you can stay in relatively cheap accommodation and take day trips into Lan Ha Bay, which is an extension of Ha Long Bay, but much quieter in terms of tourists as overnight trips from Hanoi cannot make it that far in just one day.

I managed to get transportation sorted to Cat Ba Island leaving just the day after the Tet holiday. The transportation didn't seem to go quite as smoothly as our travel company planned, and they walked us for about thirty minutes along a road in search of transportation to take us to the bus station, before eventually finding a willing driver. (We were subsequently told how we were 'very lucky!' that they'd found us someone, despite us already having payed inflated prices for the transportation...)

Transportation to the island involved a further two buses, followed by a half hour ferry journey (where there was so little space that most of us had our bags balanced on the roof of the ferry), and a final short bus journey on the island itself.

I knew immediately on arrival that I'd made a good decision about coming here. The weather, thought not scorching, was warm and beautiful, and even though we were only on the edge of the bay, the scenery was spectacular.

After checking in to the hostel, I had a wander around the island to take in the views.

The greater Ha Long Bay area is famous for the thousands of plant covered karsts which rise out of the water, with the name 'Ha Long Bay' literally meaning 'Where the dragon descends into the sea'. The scenery was stunning, and as you can see, the island was nearly empty (much helped by the proximity to New Year).

As it was already afternoon by the time I arrived, it was too late to actually venture out into the bay. Instead, I decided to climb to a place called Cannon Fort which promised excellent views of the bay, as well as a little bit of war history. 

After a relatively steep uphill climb (I seemed to be the only person walking, with many motorbikes whizzing past me on the journey), I reached the top of the hill where there were the remains of a fort that were apparently installed by the Japanese in WWII, but then used in subsequent wars in Vietnam. (again, the scope of areas that the war seemed to reach continued to surprise me). The fort had some models of army supplies tucked away in the bunkers.

There was also the cannon which gives the fort its name.

However, the main draw of the fort was the amazing view it offered of the karst mountains that snaked their way along the bay.

As I walked back down, the sun began to set, which transformed the landscape, but made it no less beautiful.

After the sun was down, I made my plans for the next day, which would be my only full day on the island. I decided that I wanted to explore the area by Kayak, and booked a tour through a company called Asia Outdoors who are based on the island. The tour involved being taken right into the middle of Lan Ha Bay where you could Kayak around for a few hours before stopping for a lunch break and then kayaking for another few hours. I was tempted by another tour they had which included kayaking and rock climbing on the karsts, but this was pretty far out of my budget.

The next morning, we were all driven to the harbour and boarded our ship which went for about forty minutes, taking us deeper into the bay.

The water was a really pretty greenish colour, and the karsts rising out of them were spectacular. If you look closely in this picture, you can also just about see the conjunctivitis which was slowly creeping its way in to my unknowing eyes (by the end of this tour, my right eye was burning and it soon became clear that pink eye was the culprit).

As we chugged along in our boat, we passed a number of small fishing villages who actually live in the bay. Many of them make their living through pearl farmings, where hundreds of are put in baskets filled with sand and dropped at the bottom of the bay. We could later see hundreds of baskets in the shallower parts of the water as kayaked along. According to our guide, Cat Ba Island produces some of the cheapest pearls in the world.

We soon boarded our kayaks, where I was paired with a guy from Denmark who was travelling with another group of friends on our trip. Initially the weather was a little chilly, and the skies were greyer than the day before, but soon the sun came out and the weather was pretty beautiful.

We stopped at a small island which had a beach (one of the draws of Lan Ha Bay is that it offers the only white sand beaches in the area). This was when the weather was at its best and we lingered on the island for about half an hour, swimming in the water and taking in the sun.

A little climbing and exploration also offered some really beautiful views of the beach and islands.

After the island, we navigated through small tunnels under the karsts, being careful to avoid some of the huge rocks around us. The bay was really peaceful and scenic, and the kayaking tour wasn't very rigorous, so we could really take our time and chill in the water. There was no garbage in the water and virtually no other tourists, and it really felt like we had the whole place to ourselves.

We stopped back on the boat for a short lunch while the boat took us to a different part of the bay.

After lunch, the weather was getting a little chillier and the sun was again submerged behind clouds. I'd made the really stupid mistake of wearing my sweatshirt in the kayak and then taking it off when it got too hot. This meant my sweatshirt got pretty wet, and after the sun went in, it was unable to dry and just made me feel really cold. For the second half of the day, we kayaked into small grottos and just took in the scenery around us.

The whole area was unlike anywhere else I'd ever seen, and felt almost like we'd been transported to the Jurassic period, with me half expecting to see dinosaurs roaming in the horizon.

Ha Long Bay is an example of a karst landscape where dissolve rock leads to huge chunks of limestone sinking, creating caves, tunnels and huge structures of vertical rock that seemingly rise out of nowhere. 

One of the locals who lives on a house boat in the bay. You can see the piles of baskets on his boat which are used for pearl farming. Many of these house boats had dogs on them which barked at us we went past. We were warned that the dogs were known to sometimes jump into the water and swim after kayakers, so it was best for us to stay out of the reach of any of them.

Around three or four, we got back on the boat and started to head back to Cat Ba island.

On the way, we were suddenly all ushered to the front of the boat, where one of the tour guides noticed some movement on one of the karsts near us. It turned out to be a Cat Ba Langur, which is one of the rarest primates in the world. There are only 60 or 70 of them remaining in the world, and we were told that we were very lucky to be able to see them. I, of course, was the last person to be able to see it after staring in the direction of the langur for a good two minutes.

After the tour, I headed back to the hostel where I made some friends with a few other people at the hostel with whom I made plans for the next day. Cat Ba Island also holds a small national park which offers some opportunities for hiking.

Our initial plan was for everyone to rent motorbikes before driving to the entrance of the park, exploring there a little bit and then driving back to the town centre. A few other people in the group had never ridden motorbikes before, so we gave ourselves sometimes to practice in a parking lot across from where we'd rented the scooters.

About five minutes had passed while everyone had seemed to adjusted to the controls of the motorbikes when I decided to really show my motorbike riding skills. Having already struggled to get the hang of turning and accelerating, I managed to accelerate my bike more than I wanted to and started heading to the (thankfully empty) main road. While I tried to break the bike, I was simultaneously turning the handles which accelerated, which meant that the bike didn't stop and I was soon running along side it, unable to stop it and getting ever closer to the road. About a metre from the road, I finally figured the only way to stop was to let go of the bike, which resulted in me falling to the ground and the bike too stopping and falling on me. Fortunately I was pretty uninjured, save for some ripped jeans, and the man who had rented us the bikes had been looking in a different direction when this happened. It was generally agreed that it was best that I ride on the back of someone else's bike (all the others had completely gotten the hang of it by this point) and my bike was promptly returned (the guy who rented the bike so us seemed pretty happy with this decision, as he didn't seem too confident when we'd first rented the bikes out, and he told me he thought this was safer).

We started to head on the bikes to the entrance to Cat Ba National Park, which was supposed to only be fifteen or so minutes away. After about forty minutes or so of driving, we'd figured that we'd maybe missed it. However, the drive was full of really amazing scenery, with karsts rising vertically from the ground in all directions.

The area was almost empty and really beautiful.

After reaching the other end of the island, we turned around, before finding the entrance to the park, which had been subtly marked out with huge gates and the words 'Cat Ba National Park' in giant gold letters.

We followed the main trail in the park (much of the national park has not yet been cleared of undetonated mines and cannot be explored without a guide). The guide was pretty marked out with stairs that were all completely built into the rocks and nature around.

At the end of the trail, we were treated to really incredible views of hundreds of karst mountains rising from the ground in every direction. 

After taking in the breathtaking scenery for a little while, we headed back down to the entrance and back to our hostel for the bus (then ferry, then bus and one more bus) back into Hanoi.

Hanoi

Hanoi

     Hanoi was the city which I entered and left Vietnam through, and I actually stopped here at three separate points during my trip. I've decided to eschew chronological order here and instead include all of my experiences in Hanoi into one post.

Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam and located high up in the north of the country and contrasts pretty sharply with Vietnam's other big city, Ho Chi Minh, in the south. Ho Chi Minh has an ever growing skyline of skyscrapers whilst Hanoi is home to the old district and French quarter, consisting of beautiful old colonial architecture. Ho Chi Minh is seen as a city that never sleeps, whilst Hanoi has a strictly enforced curfew that means that, no matter how packed the bars may be in the late hours of the evening, virtually all bars and restaurants are closed by midnight. Ho Chi Minh has year round hot weather whilst Hanoi has very chilly winters and is more often cloudy and grey than not. Nevertheless, despite their differences, both cities contain streets crowded with incessantly buzzing scooters, a wealth of delicious street food stands and more cafes than you could ever count.

I arrived in Hanoi at the same time as a massive cold spell had Southern Asia in its clutches. Armed only with a hat and a sweatshirt for warmth, my first two days in the city were a little difficult and I generally had to keep moving in order to stay warm. Fortunately, Hanoi offered a huge array of places to explore.

I started the morning with my first Vietnamese coffee. This particular kind of coffee is called an egg coffee made with an egg yolk, condensed milk and sugar mixture that tops a coffee base. You simply mix the two together to drink a sweet and frothy beverage that resembles desert more than anything else.

After my coffee, I explored the streets of the old quarter where I was staying. The streets were very picturesque, with narrow streets crowded with trees, old buildings and Vietnamese flags. Although don't be fooled by this photo - scooters were also not in short supply. 

The streets of the old quarter were very distinct with thousands of small plastic chairs and tables spilling onto the streets from bars, cafes and restaurants. When you went into the heart of the old quarter, it was basically one giant giant outdoor food court, with hundreds of locals and tourists mixed together while enjoying their food and drinks. Apparently the reason for the plastic chairs and tables is because it is very easy for restaurants to quickly pack them away if a police offer who has an issue with the crowded streets is headed a their way. However, the use of these chairs and tables is so widely practiced and seen everywhere that I have trouble believing that any police officer is really pretending that they don't know about them.

One of the sites on the old quarter is a beautiful building called St Joseph's Cathedral. Construction of the Cathedral was started in the late 1800s, and the imposing gothic style of the building contrasts sharply with the local temples in the area.

The streets were covered in Vietnamese flags, the sickle and hammer of the Communist party and the roman numerals XII which indicated the ongoing selection of the government's 12th party congress.


After the Cathedral,  headed to the Hoa Lo Prison Museum, also nicknamed the 'Hanoi Hilton' by the American prisoners who were held there during the war. The Prison was originally built by the French in 1896 and held many prominent communist party members who were fighting for Vietnamese independence. The Communist Party in turn used the prison for similar reasons, holding political dissidents and American prisoners of war.

The museum mostly focused on the treatment of Vietnamese prisoners by the French, detailing the brutal treatment of the people who were held there and celebrating the sacrifices made by the party members who died during their imprisonment.

The museum included lots of plastic models of famished prisoners in rags to demonstrate the methods of imprisonment at Hoa Lin.

Some art showing the Vietnamese prisoners.

The building itself, despite its dark history, was pretty beautiful and typified the French colonial style that many places in Hanoi have.

As well as information on the imprisonment of Vietnamese soldiers, the museum also had two rooms which talked about the use of the prison during the Vietnam War  to hold American prisoners of war. The museum couldn't have tried harder to contrast the treatment of Americans with Vietnamese. Whereas the sections on the Vietnamese prisoners (detained by the French) had images of people in appalling conditions and nearing death, in the section on the American prisoners, the museum had lots of pictures of smiling soldiers sitting down for meals, receiving fresh clean clothes and getting plenty of exercise outside. There was even a small video which depicted the 'happy' lives of the American prisoners. It was nice reminder of how different history can be depending on who is presenting it to you.

The section on the American soldiers also had the parachute and uniform of Senator John McCain, who spent some time in the Hoa Lin Prison (the museum forgot to mention any of the torture he underwent during his visit there).

After the prison museum, I met up with my housemate and his friend who were also staying in Hanoi at the same time. They had organised a free tour with an organisation known as Hanoi Kids. Hanoi Kids is an organisation that trains university students to provide free tours to Western tourists in the city. The idea is that the tourists get a free tour whilst the university students get the opportunity to practice English with native speakers.

Hanoi Kids are basically willing to take you anywhere in the city (they first have to undergo training and tests to ensure they have knowledge of all the main tourist sites), and after a failed attempt to go to the Ethnology Museum (closed for security reasons), we settled on the Temple of Literature.

We had two tour guides who were able to give plenty of information to us about the Temple of Literature and the different details in the temples architecture and their significance. They quizzed us as we went and although I did pretty well on the day, I have to say I've forgotten a lot of what we were told. The Temple of Literature is a Confucian Temple which was founded in 1070 and was home to the first ever university in Vietnam which was established in 1076. Here nobles were trained in the ways of Confucianism and could take a number of exams (the regional exam, national exam, and palace exam) in their efforts to become a Mandarin, one of the most highly regarded positions in Vietnamese bureaucracy. 

There was definitely a significance to the square and circle shapes in the pond and architecture here. I think it had something to do with the land and the sun, but I really can't remember now.

Our tour guides were really friendly and knowledgable and it was really interesting to talk to them while we walked around. They told us how just twenty years ago, people might have been stopped and asked questions by the police if they were seen walking around with foreigners. They expressed in interest in America and England (one of them talked about how he was 'Feeling the Bern') and the girl was in complete hysterics after our friend Charlie mentioned that he needed to use the bathroom, as she said how strange it was for her to talk so openly about something like that.

Outside the Temple of Literature with my two friends and our tour guides.

After the temple of literature, they took us to get some restaurant at a famous place called Trang Tien ice-cream. The place has been around since 1958, and we were encouraged to try the traditional young rice' flavored ice cream on a popsicle stick. I've never had a flavour like this, and it was simultaneously delicious sweet and mouth wateringly savoury.

As they took us back to the centre of the old quarter, they recommended a Banh Mi restaurant to me, which served delicious Banh Mi that only ranked second to my latter Banh Mi in Hoi An (this place's most popular Banh Mi was actually called 'Banh Mi Hoi An' and was possibly a nod to the quality of the sandwiches in the city).

We followed our tour with more eating, where we had some slow stewed Chinese pork, fried rice and delicious fresh spring rolls.

We then took to the city's streets to drink a fresh beer called Bia Hoi. Bia Hoi is a special kind of beer served throughout Vietnam which is unpasteurised and made daily. The beer is incredibly cheap, costing as little as £0.15 for a glass, and had a strange nutty flavour that wasn't bad (apparently because the beer is made daily by a bunch of different places, taste can really vary from brew to brew). Although the streets were initially packed with people, the presence of the city's curfew soon became noticeable. Our first bar closed up at 10:30, and we were only able to stay at the second one for half an hour before they too closed down.

The next morning, I was off to the airport to fly down south, eventually making my return to the city two weeks later.

My second journey to Hanoi was via night bus from the Phong Nha caves, which was definitely an interesting experience. When we first got onto the bus, it quickly became apparent that despite the ten or so people who were getting on, there were only two or three free seats/beds. After a lot of confusion, with a some makeshift beds being made on  on the floor of the aisles, everyone eventually had a place to sleep. For myself, I ended up in the bed of a girl who'd apparently been throwing up the whole journey and decided to get off the bus in Phong Nha. Not ideal, but there wasn't much I could do. Sleeping on the bus proved pretty difficult throughout the journey as the bus we were on was honking its horn every few seconds to alert traffic in front that it was coming and had no intention of stopping or slowing down (as big vehicles seem to do in Vietnam). I eventually managed to catch a few hours of sleep, before we were woken with the blasting of Gangnam Style at 4 in the morning to announce our arrival (three hours ahead of time) in Hanoi. A lot of the travelers were pretty angry at the way in which we were woken up, but I found it hard to see past the hilariousness of the situation. We got off the bus and I headed to my hostel where I had to wait for two hours for the receptionist who was sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag to acknowledge me and let me put my bag away in the luggage room. However I was unable to check in for another seven hours or so, so took to the streets to explore the city some more.

I turned out to have made a really good decision to fly south straight after arriving. On my return to Hanoi, the cold rain weather had completely vanished and I was instead greeted with blue skies and warm sunshine.

I headed down to Hoan Kiem Lake first, which is home to a pretty bridge and lots of cafes and park benches. The day of my arrival coincided with the first day of Vietnamese New Year and many of the restaurants and shops were closed for the morning. Instead, the streets were crowded with locals in very smart clothing who were slowly wandering around and taking pictures. The streets had a really cheerful and festive atmosphere, helped by the emerging sunshine.

The Hanoi Opera House in the French Quarter.

As I walked around the city, I ended up near the Temple of Literature again, which had a very different atmosphere to the last time I'd visited. The area is obviously a popular destination on the first day of Tet, and there were huge crowds lining up to go inside. On the side of the road, there were a number of calligraphers who were writing New Year's Greetings in traditional characters for people.

I saw the imposing outside of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum (closed for the day) which houses the preserved body of Ho Chi Minh.

I then walked towards the Tran Quoc Pagoda, which seemed to be another local hotspot during Tet. The streets were increasingly crowded with people, all wearing their smartest clothes, including many children wearing traditional Vietnamese outfits.

The crowds eventually became too difficult to navigate through and I decided to just enjoy the pagoda from afar. This particular pagoda is the oldest Buddhist temple in Vietnam and was originally constructed in the sixth century (though the current incarnation is from the 1800s).

Some locals in traditional clothes.

One of Hanoi's most famous culinary exports is Pho, or noodle soup, which is arguably the most popular Vietnamese food outside of Vietnam. Pho consist of a clear broth, rice noodles, some fresh herbs and meat (usually very thin strips of rare beef, but also sometimes chicken). I decided to check out a restaurant called Pho Thin, which is supposed to serve some of the best in the city. The restaurant had a very hole in the wall feel to it, with no decorations and metal tables and benches, but the Pho was delicious.

A few days after Chinese New Year (having escaped to Cat Ba island for a few days), the city's sites had begun to open their doors again, and I made a second attempt to go to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology.

This museum was in a very modern looking building and seemed very popular with locals and tourists alike. The Vietnamese government recognises 54 different Ethnic groups in Vietnam, and this museum had plenty of information on them, giving details on how people's clothing, festivals and way of life differed throughout the country.

The museum included lots of reconstructions of the houses of different ethnic groups with examples of their elaborate and beautiful traditional clothing.

Outside, the museum had a huge play park with giant reconstructions of the different kinds of houses that various tribes have.

After spending a couple of hours at the museum, I headed back to the city centre where I was delighted to find out that one of my favourite restaurants in Vietnam had reopened again after the New Year. The restaurant was called Bun Cha Dac Kim and served a Hanoi specialty called Bun Cha. Bun Cha consists of a bowl of grilled meat patties in a clear broth, and a huge plate of herbs, rice noodles and spices and seasonings. The idea is that you dip whatever you want into your bowl, thus catering the meal to your own tastes.

Bun Cha is definitely one of my favourite Vietnamese foods and the meat was very juicy and incredibly flavoursome. 

You could see the meat being cooked in huge batches outside the restaurant over a box of fire. The meat was especially delicious from the slightly charred flavour that this style of cooking gave it.

With a late evening flight to Taipei impending, I decided to spend my last remaining hours in the city at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre.

Northern Vietnam is famous for its water puppetry which was originally started in the 11th century by farmers who used the flooded rice paddies as their stage.

The puppet show included lots of water being shot around, dancing, singing, fireworks and an assortment of strange looking characters and animals. The show was accompanied by some traditional music by a live band  in the corner of the stage. The whole show was obviously in Vietnamese, and it was very difficult to understand what was happening, but it was interesting (if not impossible to follow) regardless.

The show made sure to get as much use out of its water setting as possible, with plenty of puppets splashing one another and shooting out water.

The sun had set by the time I left the puppet theatre and I began to make my way to one of the airport shuttle buses to head back to the airport, feeling both sad to be leaving such a beautiful country, but also ready to return to the relatively more ordered and familiar city of Taipei.