FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO THE BAY

(Vietnam Vacation Part 4)

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Before leaving Sapa, we finally had a somewhat clear day to take a hike. We decided to do a fifteen mile circuit trip passing some Red Dao and Black H’mong villages. The first six miles or so was pretty easy as it was along a road. We had a chance to see the terraced mountainsides that Sapa is famous for. Following some directions, we headed onto a variety of small footpaths and hoped we were going the right way! We came across a tour group with a guide and a number of H’mong women in one of the small villages. They asked us where our guide was and we pointed at each other. Everybody got a good laugh out of that, but the guide said the middle part of our planned hike was a difficult trail and tried to dissuade us from doing it. We thought about it and decided to continue onward.

Three H’mong women joined in our adventure which turned out to be very helpful. The steep, slippery, muddy trail went right over the mountain. Two of the women took hold of Lois’ hands to prevent her from sliding down the trail. In some ways, the climb up and back down was the easy part.  The really hard part for us, had we been alone, would have been to find the trail. In many cases, we were walking on the one foot wide dividing walls between rice paddies. The H’mong women knew the way since they walked this path on a near daily basis. About two muddy hours later, we arrived at a Red Dao village and a reasonably obvious trail which we were able to follow back to Sapa. Before saying goodbye to our guides, we bought a small hand woven item from each one and took a picture. We just wish we had a picture of our muddy shoes and pants to show you. Hey, we do! Check out Lois’ shoes in the photo below.

From Sapa, we went to Bac Ha and took our first step toward Northeast Vietnam.  Since this travelogue is not titled “The Northeast Highlands”, you might guess we were not very successful. This was for two reasons. The first was we got to Bac Ha and found it to be cold (low 50s) and even damper than Sapa. Enough, already! We want better weather! Time to head south. The second reason was that we could not find a bus to Ba Be National Park and didn’t want to go halfway and find we had to go back the way we came. So, we took a day train from Pho Lu, a town about twenty five miles from Bac Ha and Lai Cao/Sapa, all the way to Hanoi.

There are a variety of trains (local, regular, express) and classes (sleeper, soft seat, hard seat) on Vietnamese trains. The train we took was a local train (16 stops over 185 miles) and the best we could get was second class “hard seats”. The wide, high backed, wooden benches sat two people each.  Sets of benches faced each other with a small table between them creating a nice space for four people. While the ride was nine hours long, we found time went by pretty quickly chatting with other passengers, reading, watching the landscape roll by and, of course, eating. Women would jump on the train at each stop and offer all sorts of food and drink: beef jerky, sticky rice, hard boiled eggs, sugar cane, roasted corn on the cob, steamed rice dumplings with pork, packaged snacks (chips), coffee, tea, beer and soda.

We arrived in Hanoi at about 9:00 PM, got a nice room at the same hotel as before and enjoyed the wonders of modern technology. So far, there has been Internet access in most towns but it has been excruciatingly slow, considerably worse than using a 56K modem. However, our hotel in Hanoi had wireless internet and it was fast. We powered up Paul’s laptop, hooked up the headphones and used Skype to make some calls home for 2.1¢ a minute! Having the laptop has allowed us to review our digital photos and then write them to CDs.  It has made it easier to write travelogues but, as you can tell, finding the time to do so remains a major problem.

The next morning we were back on the road to Haiphong, the third largest city in Vietnam and a major port. While it was a very pleasant city, with green parks, a number of nice fountains and attractive rivers and canals, there wasn’t much in Haiphong to keep us there. We took a ferry to our true destination, Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The bay consists of thousands of limestone islands with small beaches and caves created by the wind and waves. About half of Cat Ba Island, one of the largest islands in the bay, was declared a national park to protect the diverse flora and fauna residing there.

Cat Ba was a fishing village turned into tourist destination, but there were still a lot of people living on the water. Much of the harbor and a number of areas around the island had floating villages. People, stores, animals and farms all existed in boats on the water. Cat Ba town consisted of a string of six and seven story hotels all facing the harbor. We took a walk on a path along the shore and came to a high end resort ($55/night in off season, $80/night in peak) in a beautiful little bay. It would have been a wonderful spot during beach season, but it was still a little cold for swimming. We had lunch and enjoyed the surroundings. A little further along the boardwalk, were public beaches with palapas, beach chairs, boogie boards and even swimming trunks for rent.

One of the most popular activities in Halong Bay is a two day/one night tour of the bay. The boats are traditional sailboats with two ¼ circle ruffled sails and a small engine. Our boat had a captain, a first mate, an Australian woman, a French couple and the two of us. We took a nice leisurely trip through the bay, past various floating villages and through the karst limestone outcroppings. It was very quiet and peaceful – no motos, no horns, no TV, just the gentle lapping of the water, the creak of a hinge as the boat rocked and an occasional bird call.

A few times, we stopped and took a small rowboat to one of the islands to check out a cave or beach. The rowboat itself was very interesting. Essentially, it was a tightly woven bamboo basket that had hot tar applied to the bottom to make it waterproof. It proved to be very lightweight and very maneuverable. One highlight was taking the rowboat through a tunnel in one of the limestone mountains. The tunnel was about ten feet high and twenty five feet wide when we went during low tide. On the other side of the tunnel was this beautiful lagoon surrounded by limestone cliffs on all sides. We saw two small rowboats with people fishing from them. Much to our surprise one of them headed our way and we saw that it belonged to a fisherwoman/snack saleswoman. We guessed we weren’t the only ones visiting the lagoon that day!

While we were out exploring, the first mate was hard at work preparing a meal for us.  Lunch was a delicious buffet of steamed clams, fried calamari with carrots and onions, fish in tomato and ginger sauce, cucumber, cooked cabbage, eggs and steamed rice. It may have been specific to our captain, or the owner of the boat, but one of the things we liked was that everyone, tourists and crew had lunch together. Plus, the friendly captain kept filling everyone’s bowl with food when they weren’t looking. After meals, at the suggestion of the Australian woman, we got an impromptu Vietnamese lesson from the captain and first mate. 

When bedtime came, the first mate converted the enclosed cabin area into what amounted to a twelve foot wide bed for us five tourists. Luckily, we had all day to get to know each other before we “slept together”. The captain and first mate slept in a protected area on the deck. During the summer, people typically sleep out on the deck with the stars as their blanket. The second day was an enjoyable repeat of the first.

This brings our travelogue up to about January 25. We’ve actually covered a lot of ground since then and we’ll try to get out another e-mail about it soon enough…

Paul & Lois
Hue, Vietnam
February 3, 2007

Vietnam Vacation Part 3                 Vietnam Vacation Part 5

 

All content is copyright © Paul Schneider, 2007.