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Sunday 11th February
We head off to Halong Bay passing french colonial style houses along the way - the remnants of the influence prior to Vietnam gaining independence in 1958. The houses have built without any thought for the future as they are all at slightly different angles and set further back or forwards from the road. So if you were to join them up everyone's front doors would not line up. Hee hee.
There are rice fields in every direction for as far as the eye can see with women working bent-double picking the crop while wearing traditional conical hats. No wonder so many old people we see are so stooped.
The other thing that's common is they put their graveyards right in the middle amongst their crops. I guess we must make good fertiliser with all the nutrients going back into the ground. Just think about that next time you're eating tucking into some rice.
We pass men with pigs on their mopeds - live ones - strapped into cages on the sides and on their backs tied on with string.
We arrive at the port and get on our Junk boat. The rooms are better than most of the places we've stayed in - hooray! We sit at a table with Marco, a german who was studying in china; also an australian, Dave and his considerably younger vietnamese girlfriend, Hun. He works for the australian government helping to provide a senior school education to refugees who have come from many places around the world. Usually they have been living in refugee camps for around 8 years and have seen all sorts of attrocities. What an amazing job.
There are 1,960 small islands in Halong Bay, of which only Cat Ba is inhabited. If you've ever seen the James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun, you may remember the island where the bad guy lived. Well that part of the film could have been shot in Halong Bay because the setting is just like it. The archipelago is absolutely stunning and although we are here in their winter, you can imagine how beautiful this place is in summer. Unfortunately the photo's don't do it justice because of the mist. Halong Bay means descending dragon and legend has it that a dragon churned up the mud and made the mountains as it descended into the water.
We visited "Amazing Cave" which was huge then went to a fish farm and around the floating villages. They literally float four barrels at each corner and then lay planks over the top and then build houses on them! Incredible. This was later followed by some kayaking and swimming - brrrr. While out kayaking some of the men fishing beckoned to us and offered Marco a smoke on his pipe. The tobacco was so strong he thought he was going to be sick. Tee hee.
We anchor for the night and the local women who live on the floating villages come around the boat shouting their mantra if you dare go up on deck, "Hey, you, you want to buy something?" By now we know to say "No thank you." once and don't answer again. Some of the tourists on the boat don't realise that it's a bit of a game with them where they see how many times they can get the tourists to keep saying "no thank-you". So we sit back and watch some of the other passengers fall for it smiling to ourselves and remembering that we were that green only a few weeks ago!
Monday 12th February
We float over to Cat Ba island and I trek for 2 hours up to the view point where around 20 of us try and cram onto the small area at the top of this mountain. The reason it's so difficult for us all to fit on there is because they've stuck this great big monstrous tower of rusting stairs up there which looks set to fall down at any moment. Naturally I head straight up to the top for a better view.
We meet up with a couple of italian guys, an australian and a spaniard and spend the evening chatting with them. Fortunately english is the common language and the europeans put us to shame with their fluency. I so want to improve my italian and spanish.
Cat Ba is like a ghost town because everyone has gone home to their family for Tet. It's like being on Llandudno promenade at 6am on a Sunday morning or a scene out of Quadronphenia - all bad Blackpool pier style lighting and the odd moped whizzing by.
The old man at our hotel is delightful, he really tried with his english but most of the talking is done in sign language and drawings. He shows us to our room which looks like Vera Duckworths bedroom probably did in the 1970's. Bright yellow with blankets on the bed that have glorious technicolour flowers on them. It was so special we had to take a photo of it.
There are girls selling pearls on every street corner and now as you walk past them the mantra has become, Hey, you, you want to buy pearl?". Very funny!
Tuesday 13th February
We float blissfully back to the mainland on our Junk boat and head back to Hanoi to the train station where we get on the sleeper train down to Hue. The sleeper trains are dreadful, nothing like as good as the thai trains. We won't be getting on one of those again if we can help it!
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