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.