Luxury Travel

After learning about the extremely high costs of the day trips from Nimb Bimh we decided to head back to Cat Ba and just chill out on the island for a week or so. We rode another local bus and missed the fast Hydrofoil and had to wait another 2 1/2 hours for the next slow boat. The port station director made us very comfortable and we kept cheersing over shots of very potent rice wine as he chatted on about the war, President Bush and about how many languages he can fluently speak. Very funny man.
Going back to Cat Ba was by far the best choice we have made in the north. The season is approaching into summer and the island has come alive. Its still Spring though and the true tourist season doesnt start for another 4 to 5 weeks. The weather is just perfect and there is just enough farangs to give the place a little atmosphere but not too many to rise the price of the hotels.
Most of the Hotels are along the main strip and cost about $5 and soar to $25 USD in summer. This time we decided to shop around and find a really nice place as we wanted to settle in for a week. The man from the hotel we stayed at last time was on the pier when our boat arrived fighting for customers amoung 6 or 7 other hoteliers, all possessing shining folders with pictures of their rooms promising balconies and cleanliness. They all talk at once and try to drag you into their hotel. I checked out a few. I didnt have the heart to tell the man from the last place we stayed that I was scratching for days. Besides, I had broken the shower hose so there was no chance of going back there.
I found a hotel right in the moddle of the stip, not the newest but had spacious rooms, a large balcony and lots of natural light. We were just so exhausted after a full days travelling and were stinging for a cold beer on the balcony.

Sam hated it straight away. We sat on the bed and suddenly I spotted a hair! and then another one! and then I started counting them! Horrified as memories came flooding back at thought of lice scratching about on my head and bumps showing up all over my body. I was absolutely distraught and thought about checking out right then and there. Sam calmed me down, said I was tired from all the travelling and that I am probably sensitive and over reacting. Ok. I asked for new sheets, they had hairs on them too. I stole fresh pillows from the open room up the hall. I wish I had bought those silk sleeping bags I saw in hanoi. I remade the beds and we decided we would check out in the morning. It will be Ok I told myself, have a shower, have a bite to eat and it will all be over soon.
I had a shower and started drying my face with the towel, PHEW! It stunk like it had been in a mouldy cupboard for a year. I had to dry myself with the emergency chamios we bought in Australia. After my shower it got worse! Much much worse! The pipes started emitting the foulest sewerage smell! Disgusted we went for a walk, perhaps it will go away. We went out to a cute little restaurant and tried the Sea Mantis. They were really nice, but not much meat on them. We bought some beer and came back to our hotel to sit on the balcony and play cards. After a couple hands of Euka the smell was unbearable! How can we sleep with that smell! It even stunk from out on the balcony! Inside the room was like sticking your head in a feasting toilet bowl.
We packed up and stormed downstairs. Half drunk and very angry I interupted the two men in the reception giving each other a full body massage to damand our passports whilst decribing the stinking state of the room was not fit for animals to live in.

Now we are staying in a perfect hotel called Hoang Ngoc. It has all the creature comforts and happens to be brand new and sparkling clean. Fluffy fluffy towels and floppy quilts and fresh rooms that get made up every day. Ahhh, finally.

We bought our ticket for halong Bay from the tour agent in our hotel who did our washing and then I am later to discover my red singlet missing. Pissed off. We bought a $50 luxury ticket rather than the $38 basic ticket. We stay in a 3 star hotel on Cat Ba Island, see monkeys on Monkey Island, go kayaking and sleep on the boat.

Today we borded our Junk and sailed into the floggy haze over Halong Bay.The bay has an errie feeling, a sorta 'priates of the carribean' feel with the hundreds of other Junk boats cruising by.
Halong Bay was just breathtaking, the tourist offices say its 'The jewel of North Vietnam', and everything the guidebooks said it would be.

We never realised just how massive and beautiful Halong Bay is. It seemed never ending. Halong" translates into "where the dragon descends into the sea and there are hundreds of ghostly islands that look like they are floating on top of the calm bay, the edges have eroded away with the tides creating little caves to the otherside. Halong Bay is world heritage listed and now I can see why.

After a relaxing sail, we stopped to admire one of the many limestone caves in the area. The caves have a bumpy mattress effect on the roof where the water had been dripping for many years and there are some very amusing rock formations of a budda, a turtle, jesus and yes, even a penis. (he he)

The afternoon was spent kayaking in these beautiful waters ...The kayaking was it highlight of the day and I'm really anoyed that I have used up all my photo memory because words just cannot describe it.

Our guide asked us if we could swim then sent us out into the waters and told us not to get lost. Meanwhile other professional looking groups with guides and life jackets purposely weaved their way through the islands off to somewhere special. Its just funny really, I´m not complaining, thats the way we like it (tours not for us) We followed the other group some of the way paddling though the floating villages, the water warmish and the weather had cleared. Sam spotted a little cave under a small island and with his excellent steering technique we made it through without bashing the sides. Inside the cave was dark and echoie and the water the most beautiful emerald green. On the other side we were surprised to find a gorgeous secluded beach where we trod on oyster shells, examined a piece of foam stuck in the rock and re-enacted a 'Wilson' sceen. It was so private and I wonder how many 'The Beach' type places exist out here in Halong Bay.

The Junks are all wooden traditional boats with enormous sweeping burnt orange sails. The sleeping berths are along the bottom of the boat, the restuarant on the second level and the open air deck on the 3rd where you just sit back with your beer and watch the thin mist settle on the bay in the lazy afternoon. I rest my legs on the deckchair while enjoying the view. Ahh, if only everyday could be like this …

After visiting the caves the boat churned along towards Cat Ba Island. Suprisingly it took 2 1/2 hours. As we started to sail into choppy waters I spent half of that 2 1/s hours turning blue and resisting chucking over the edge.

Sam found football on the Australian channel today. Very exciting. Manly V Parramatta his favourite team. It was a close game, so close that it was 20 all and overtime was about to kick in..... but the network didnt take that into consideration and another program started.

5 minutes on.......

Sam is still perched on the edge of the bed wide-eyed and open-jawed. I suspect he is in a state of shock or something of the sort as he is frantically flicking at the remote over and over again and swearing profusely. Sometimes his eyes gaze over and his face goes blank and occasionally he leers at me with pleading eyes looking for emotional support.
Gosh, I hope he's ok.
So I dont know what we are going to do now. Throwing the telle out of the window isnt an option because then we'd have to pay for it. I really dont think he will ever fully recover, he was already in a sorry state of depression from missing the whole season and now this has damaged his fagile soul even more. Poor thing. He'll just have to pull through.

Today it is stinking hot, I went for a walk to the Japanese Bridge to take some photos and then joined the back of a French tour group into a Chinese Assembly Hall. They were speaking to me French, explaining the details of the architecture, all I could do was nod and occasionally acknowledge them with a 'bien bien'. They started staring at me, I think I blew my cover, I turned beetroot and hightailed it out of there! 'Merci beaucoup¡', 'Au revoir'! I couldn't understand a word of it anyhow!

In the hot stinking afternoon Sam and I ended up taking motos to a beach bar to cool off. We found a place called Zero Seamile, I saw the flyer on the table at a bar I was having a drink at last night. They have an awesome infinity pool and long lazy sunbeds with pull out drink trays that the staff always keep full. Thats the life. They have the sharpest pool table in Vietnam and Sam was cleaning up which meant I was loosing. Tonight they are putting on a bonfire but dont think we will stay, its not that cheap here and they are really stingy with the food. And I mean really stingy.

The beach is pretty in Hoi An, lots and lots of umbrellas and restuarants along the sand. There are ladies walking up and down the beach with baskets of fresh fruit, a girl named 'Song' told me to only by from her, not the others. I didnt see her again.

Been watching the staff build a little hut all day and been lazing around jumping in and out of the pool, learning Spanish and reading Mr Nice. Today we made our own breakfast of sugar toast with bananas and yogurt orange juice poppers. We`ve been eating lots of bananas, fruit shakes and fresh mangoes.

Yesterday Sam got a really bad haircut from the local Mui Ne barber who sported a very bad haircut himself. At first I really freaked out, it looked as though Sam was going to be running around with an awesome flat top for the rest of the day, but after much fussing and reassurance from the anonymous heads poking through the windowless hole in the wall. ....and after more trimming, more razoring, more brushing, the barber finally tamed down the top and pulled out his scarey looking flip blade. As I heard the razor scrape down on dry skin I flinched slightly at the thought of Sam loosing his head in the flick of a hand movement. At this point we were both thinking we would be happy with the job, no matter what it looks like, just pay the man and get out of there!

So Sam now looks like he is joining the army. We both keep trying to convince ourselves that it looks ok, smoothing it down with some water every now and then...

We have hit the a record level of laziness. We have been so lazy lately, we get out of bed at 3 in the arvo. It´s just so hard to walk out to the pool (right outside our door) and the biggest decisions we have to make are if we should play cards first or go for a swim first. I have slowly been learning to sleep in the middle of the day.
We are so lazy that we get so tired and we are so lazy that last night we were in bed by 7.30. Thats lazy.

Pic taken on our afternoon cruise along Mui Ne beach.

Me using the local kids swing hanging from a coconut tree.

Last night I was rudely awaken by being repeatively biten on my head by an anonymous abusive creature. My eye puffed out to double its normal size and I had an engorged forehead. I franically searched around for giant mozzies or bull ants, whatever it was, it had to be enormous! Then the swelling puffed out to massive proportions and I started to panic (aahhh!!!)... What are the doctors like in Vietnam?, How do I tell them this is not what I really look like, and how far are they from Mui Ne beach?
And then I had thoughts of staying like this forever! What if it never goes down! After desperate attemps, I couldn´t find the bitee and have come to the conclusion that it must be a strange and very rare Vietnamese microscopic bug with great face swelling properties.

............By morning my face was back to normal.

The days are going really slow but it feels like the week here at Mui Ne has gone by quite fast. We are going to Nha Trang not tomarrow, but the next day so we had better make the most of lazing about. Sam does anyway. He spends at least 14 hours out of a 24 hour period sleeping and sometimes up to 18 hours! My god, who would've thought it was humanly possible.

We found another good and cheap local restaurant today, and even though the husband and wife owners have intense screaming matches in the kitchen out back, we still really like it. I call it the 'blue-plastic-chair-place' . It doesn´t mean we are ditching the 'red-plastic-chair-place', we still love the red-plastic-chair-place.

The blue-plastic-chair-place is cheaper than the red-plastic-chair-place, although its pretty much the same except it has blue plastic chairs instead of red ones and it not right on the beach like the red-plactic-chair-place.

The lady that runs it (the blue-plastic-chair-place) waves her hands at everyone getting off the buses across the street going into the resorts. It does no good. She has bad teeth but thats ok, we are going back for dinner tonight. For lunch today it only cost us $5! Five bucks!
Five bucks for fried noodles with veggies and fish in claypot, steamed rice, lemonade, watermelon juice and a very yummy thick and tastey mango shake. How good that eh?

Things that make us smile about Mui Ne

- The beach, its just beautiful here. In the afternoons we wait for the tide to go down to go for a walk otherwise the waves crash right up against the breakwall of our resort.

- Our resort, the umbrellas, the lazy sunbeds and the pool

- The friendly locals at the grocery store down the street

- The NZ gelato, it's everywhere, I haven't had any yet, but I know it will be good. 28 flavours.

- Cheap bananas and mangoes

- No postcard hawlkers in Mui Ne

Things that dont make me smile about Mui Ne

- Overpriced thongs, I mean $42 for reefs! please!

- Our resort restaurant, not only do they serve shit food, but they trick you into thinking you have free breakfasts and then slowly start charging you for them.

- The stinking red brick shack half way down the street. What is it!? It f"@k'n stinks!! What is it!!??

- The moto guys asking you one hundred and seventy two times a day at least, if you would like a ride down to the other side of the beach which looks exactly the same as the side of the beach we are on.

- The padantic Canadian in the room next door who tacks away at his lap top all day and night and orders coconuts and coffee for breakfast and just has to watch the sunset everyday or he will die. Get out of his way.

- The unbelievably stupid TV channels with repeats of the making of American golf courses.