Cat Ba & Trang An

Well, yesterday, after a long night’s sleep on an excellent mattress, we set out to look at more of Cat Ba island, which cemented in my mind the opinion that Cat Ba is a bit of a dive and there isn’t really much there.

All along the main street are pearl vendors, but with no real way of knowing whether they were real I forced myself to keep my hands out of my purse. Apart from that, there are a couple of slightly odd and more-or-less deserted bars, and ditto restaurants.

We headed inland into Cat Ba island, most of which appears to be a construction site. Han Solo’s adorable girlfriend and another English-speaking guide accompanied us, together with a driver, in a van with terrible suspension tearing down under-developed roads and narrowly avoiding groups of school-children enjoying their afternoon cigarettes.

When we reached our destination it became apparent that our morning’s activity was to spend an estimated two hours climbing up and back down a mountain, with nothing at the top except the promise of a view. This I flatly refused to do, staying instead at the bottom in a breezy open-air kiosk with a family of sociable dogs, two books, and a couple of Spanish girls who had also made the wise choice not to follow the rest of their group.

Sim tells me that Leia sprang up the mountain like a goat, while he sweated and trudged along behind her, and that I made the right choice. Like I needed to be told. After a very filling and satisfying lunch at a restaurant somehow associated with our tour group, Leia walked us down to the jetty to take the ferry back to Haiphong for the next leg of our journey.

We were met at the other end by yet another guide and got into the car for the trip to Tam Coc. I managed to sleep for part of the way; however, with about 45 minutes to go we hit a massive and inexplicable traffic jam.

Let me assure you at this point that the “traffic” “jams” you and I may have experienced in Australia do not do justice to what I now understand to be the full import of those words. There was even a self-important traffic cop directing this one, but we still managed to spend half an hour stationary. I don’t mean inching forward at a rate of a few metres a minute like in your pedestrian Sydney suburban jams – that occupied the twenty minutes prior. I mean literally stationary. Not moving at all. Around us, people were getting out of their cars to have a smoke or make phone calls. There was no moving.

On the other hand, not moving was certainly an improvement on moving in terms of the radical diminution of the threat to my very existence. We reached new heights of road safety when, on a four-lane highway, in a country that drives on the right side of the road, we overtook a bus by moving into the far left lane. Not the left lane of the right side of the road – I mean the far left lane OF ALL OF THE LANES.

Tam Coc is likewise a bit of a dive. It seems to exist only to cater to tourists taking boats down the river. The food was mediocre. Our hotel was a bizarre labyrinth of staircases and rooms – in order to get from the restaurant to our room, we had to take three different staircases. There was a lift, but it didn’t start until the third floor.

This morning we set out for our day’s activity of cycling to Trang An, which is sort of the new Tam Coc down the road. The cycling was part of the fun. For some time now I’ve been puzzling over why it is I tend not to enjoy fun, but I’m starting to think it might have something to do with the apparent link between fun and extreme physical discomfort. I was almost in tears by the time we reached our destination, with grease smears on my legs, sweat on my face and a rookie cowboy’s limp.

It was much quieter at Trang An than Tam Coc, with no hotels or anything much, just a peaceful temple-looking tea room and a bend in the river where boats, rowed by local women, depart to take tourists through a network of limestone caves. We started to get a hint of what we were in for when our rower mimed to us, as we approached the first cave, that we should sit on the floor of the boat. Even doing so, we had to duck our heads for a couple of the lower-hanging rock faces and stalactites.

We saw a few other boats while we were out, but once again, for the most part, we were alone for almost all of the journey. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before tourism moves in and Trang An becomes another Tam Coc, but I hope it doesn’t happen too soon.

After a quick visit to some place I didn’t bother to learn the name of, with temples that just made us compare them unfavourably with those in Japan, we drove back to Hanoi. After all the local food we’ve been eating over the last few days I thought we deserved some Western indulgence, so we went to a sweet little Belgian restaurant (“Le Petit Bruxelles”) down near the Cathedral in the Old Quarter and enjoyed some foie gras. Afterwards, just to gild the lily, we headed to an ice cream parlour we’d noticed that afternoon, “Fanny Ice Cream”, and had a fairly spectacular sundae comprising pistachio, salted caramel, cinnamon, ginger and chilli chocolate ice creams, whipped cream, raspberries, almonds and caramel sauce, all served in a giant macaron.

That’s all for now. We have to be up early yet again tomorrow for our flight to Phu Quoc and the final leg of our journey.