Got tired of Do Son. The water really isn't that clean-looking, and the place has too many hookers in it for my liking. So, bought a ticket on a hydrofoil going from Hai Phong to Cat Ba Island, or at least I THOUGHT I did.....
I was under the impression that this jetfoil would blow outta Hai Phong Harbour and shoot me straight in to Cat Ba Town (the only “town” on the island – it has about 8,000 people living there).
Well, no......
There IS one that does but it wasn't the one that I bought a ticket for!
The one that I bought a ticket for forces you on a bus for, like, 40 kilometres, then drops you off at a dock in the middle of some combination of a swamp and a rice paddy in the middle of nowhere. You THEN catch the Hydrofoil there, which takes you to the BACK SIDE of Cat Ba island and drops you in the middle of the jungle.....where you then take a 30 kilometre bus ride into Cat Ba “town” - all the while avoiding VC patrols (no, jes' kidding....).....
....needless to say, this sucked and ate a ton of time.
Of course, when I BOUGHT the ticket, nobody bothered to mention to me that, with this particular carrier, I hop a bus and then a boat and THEN another bus to get to Cat Ba “town”.......naaaaaw......musta slipped their minds....
Of course, if I read Vietnamese better, I'd be able to SEE that is what this particular trip does.....but, naaaaaww.....musta slipped my mind to spend more time learning Vietnamese!
I didn't really plan Cat Ba well at all. First off, I wanted a place to crash AHEAD of time (sorry.....sorry.....getting old and I no longer really get into walking all over towns looking at fifty different hotel rooms and trying to negotiate a price). So I got a place called The Holiday View inside Cat Ba “town” for 950,000 Dong for what they call a “Deluxe Suite”! Shit....hate to see the “standard” room then because this thing was about the size of a typical Best Western or Holiday Inn. The hardwood floors were way cool, and the balcony overlooking the bay was nice, but this is VIET NAM!! This is 1/3 a month's salary for most folks in Hai Phong......Jesus.....
Still, though, it was a fifteen minute walk to the Sunset Resort (which is one of Cat Ba's three beaches – and even if the thing's ON YOUR RESORT'S PROPERTY?? It's STILL a public beach [how very Ora-gaaaan of them]) and I really enjoyed the view from the balcony, soooo......
For Sunday Night, I HAD reserved a room at the Cat Ba Island Resort and Spa. Cool, it is DIRECTLY ON beach #2....all right. Well, reserved a room for 1,000,000 for Sunday Night. Thought that on Saturday Night, I'd have a peek at what I was getting.
Got there, was taken to the room, and was not terribly impressed. For THAT kinda Dong, you'd think I'd get something a bit larger than a tiger cage! Good thing I checked it out first.....canceled immediately and went wandering about the town, looking at about 20 or so hotels!
Now, HERE'S where the fact of booking ahead DOES actually come in handy, as whilst I was walking around, it became pretty obvious that I was comparing hotels, then, like a flock of vultures, I was swarmed upon by fifty different guys: “Misser....Misser, please, cheek out MY hotel! It very nice!” Couple of 'em offered a kayak tour for an additional 100,000 Dong if I chose their hotel, but hell, a couple of these guys even offered to toss in a girl for the night for an extra 100,000 Dong if I stayed in their hotel!!! THAT was some irritating shit. Kinda thought that I left that behind in Do Son.......
BUT, after enough perseverance, I found a room at a place on the seventh (top) floor that overlooked the harbour and had actually been CLEANED since the American War (unlike, about 90% of the hotels in Cat Ba that go for less than 1,500,000 Dong a night). It's off season, and NOBODY ELSE is on the entire floor (which has, like, five rooms on it), so I have this big-ass balcony to myself, and it's a fifth of the price (200,000 Dong a night) of the place I stayed in (the Holiday View – 900,000 Dong a night) on Saturday Night. It has no Wi-Fi, but I'd been to four cafes, bars and hotels in Cat Ba “town” and tried their Wi-Fi that they advertised.......
......and THOSE don't work....so who cares?
(ONE of these days, I'll just leave the laptop at home.....)
The OTHER great planning maneuver I did was to figger - “Man, it's hot today here in Hai Phong. Oh yeah, time to pack for Cat Ba. Oh hell...les' jes' bring two T-Shirts and two pair shorts and two underwear an' we is all set!”
Well, now THAT was smart, wasn't it??
ALL my favourite outdoor beach/water activities (like kayaking and sitting on the beach all day drinking pints) were off-limits now, because this brain-surgeon (your author) NEVER BOTHERED to inquire locally before he departed as, if he had, he'd see that Hai Phong is about 25 degrees warmer than Cat Ba Island........and that thee closer to the water you actually get, the colder it becomes! Given the fact that your author has lost about 99.2% of his former ability to tolerate cold, well.....
STILL, though, at 240,000 Dong round trip for the hydrofoil and 200,000 for a cool hotel room, I KNOW I'll be back.....errrmmm.....let's just consider this an exploratory mission......
Here be some pics -
Fishing rowboat out in the open water about 5 kilometres from Cat Ba Island
Cat Ba "town".....thass it....this pretty much be all of it.....ain't nowhere near as charming as Rockaway Beach, Oregon, but at maybe a fifth of the cost....
EVERYBODY loves a floating restaurant......
View from my balcony at noon.....
The view at 6PM.....
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Bought a flight to Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon last week. Partially because I just wanted to see the War Remnants Museum (I missed it when I was there in April, 2008 because of some sort of bizarre electrical issues where they had shut the museum for the day, and I was only in Saigon for 27 hours) and the Vietnamese take on the “American War” and also because......well......shit.....there's nowhere else to fly to out of Hai Phong! Nope! A city with 2.5 million people in it, and thee only flights you can get outta there is to Ho Chi Minh City.
R.E.M. wrote the song “Can't get there from here” about Hai Phong's Cat Bi Airport.........
......basically ya gotta hop a bus for 2½ hours or ride your skooter 105 kilometres to Hanoi's Noi Bai Airport if you actually wanna go to somewhere.
But, oddly enuff, I had just gotten word two days after I bought my flight that a Viet Kieu friend of mine whom I used to work with at The City of Portland Bureau of Development Services is going to be flying from PDX to Saigon that weekend, so I is really looking forward to that.......
More from Ho Chi Minh City next weekend.....
-E-
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