International Sampoon's vacation 2007

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 have decided to stay on Cat ba island for two weeks, its the perfect place in the north to really chill out. Lifes pretty tough, most days we walk along one of the 3 boardwalks streatching around the mountain cliffs that connect all 3 of Catba´s beaches, we sit and swim and watch the staff sweep the beaches clean (yes, they sweep the beaches, with staw brooms, very funny) We bum about, eat lots of tastey Vietnamese fair for lunch and then drink beer all afternoon, either on our varandah overlooking CatBa bay or at the Aussie or Kiwi bar along the main strip.

Today we did a trip to the markets to buy some veggies for a sanga, it has been very quiet on the island, but now the tourist season is just kicking in we are starting to see more 'farangs' showing up. Anyhow, the market ladies rise their prices rediculously high to any farang. One lady tried to sell us a cucumber for $2.40! I mean, I wouldn´t pay $2.40 in any country! We ditched her buisness and spent up at the store across the street. Today we have been very lazy, watching the movie channel and drinking beer in our hotel room out of tiny glass teacups. So, in the end we played some shithead at the kiwi bar and watched sleezebags looking for STD´s hovering around the brothel next door.

18th april
Today we hired a moto and rode through the lush national park in the middle of the island and then rode up through the mini farms and the flocks of goats and followed the coast half way around the island. The Island landscape is very rugged, a cross between Jarasic Park and Lost, eagels circle above and you see tiny glimpes of weird little animals scrurring off the road at the last minute. We parked the bike to have some lunch, again fried rice, shrimp Pho and some tofu (which they had to drive to the markets to get) The guy who lent us his moto left his hat clipped into the front of the bike and it was stolen while we where eating lunch. We didn´t say anything about it when we gave the bike back.

22 april
Its a glary hazey day today on CatBa, mostly the island carries a permanent creepy haze across its mountain tops and along the bay giving it an eerie effect. Last night the island had come to life. Outdoor 20 cent beer stalls had set up with their little plastic chairs along the main strip, selling peanuts and pineapples. The ladies pulling the trolleys where about selling clothes and bits n pieces. The corn lady was full up, also selling bags of fairy floss. Thousands of Japanese tourists were riding up and down the strip on gay looking double seated bicycles but they normally dissapear by 8 oclock. We are noticing the light cargo wearing, strappy sandle, day packers who are usually sporting a guidebook looking lost. They are typically of English decent, but also some Swiss and German,..and of course the place is filling with the unwashed bed bug, dready, scarf wearing traveller who gets by on two pairs of undies and 1 pair of trousers of which the crutch hangs loosely down near their knees to give a 'I just shit myself' appearance. (Why do they do that?) Generally they identify themselves with masses of cheap jewelery knotted and twisted at every link of their body and cling to their once colourful woven moinority sholder bags. Help!! They are taking over the island! My beautiful peacefull Cat Ba! We hid away at the 'Green Mango', a more upmarket bar and restuarant where thay scatter rose pettles across your table before ordering. But tonight we just wanted to laze in their lounge area and drink their very potent long Cat Ba island iced teas, although their Cuban bean soup is very tastey.

23 april
This morning, headache and all, I am awoken by open air opera style kareoke coming from one of the floating restaurants on the bay. Hmm, kareoke at 9 in the morning? They just love it, dont they. I poke my head out to see what all the fuss is about and i am suprised to find in the middle of the main road that runs along the bay, right on the grassy patch in the medium strip, a circle of Vietnamese men -with some open jawed farangs hanging about with their cameras falling out onto the road - egging on two ugly and very angry looking birds trying to rip each others heads off! I am more shocked to find they even have their own corners. At the end of a round they grab the cocks and wash them down and pat them with towel and prop them up again making them seem refreshed and ready for the next round. I had they best seats for the fight, seated on my little stool, 9 floors above all the action. I soon get bored and scramble off to find some lunch, but 6 hours later they are still going! Cruel I say.

24th
Back at the Green Mango for more Cat Ba island iced teas. We just hung about in a daze and chatted about animals walking through the kitchens and what we'll be doing in Barcelona. We ended the night getting kicked out of the dingy nightclub at the end of the street that we swore we'd never step foot in, and ended up back on the baguette ladies street corner drinking pissweek homemade beer and stuffing our faces with sausage and quail eggs. The tasteless beer was so flat and horrible but we kept on drinking it.

Its now 3.30 in the afternoon, we've pigged out for lunch and Sam has gone back to bed and will probably stay there for the rest of the day. We will probably be doing nothing at all for a while as we have spent our quota all on food and grog. we are staying on catba for another 2 nights and then are heading back to hanoi and then Sapa for a bit of trekking, need to get some exercise.

25th
It stormed last night and we sat out on the roof top, 12 stories up, and watched the lighting crack over the bay while chugging down some cold tigers. So today is not humid at all and even though I'd planned a day at the beach, the weather is a refreshing change. Tonight is our last night on the island and I´m sorta glad we are leaving as I have become amazingly lazy on this island. We spent the day walking about the boardwalks before it started raining giant freezing cold drops of icey rain. Oh well, will have to sit down at one of the 40 cent beer stalls at the western end of the beach up near the markets. We have made it a bit of a habit. We love sitting there in the arvos spending next to nothing cracking peanuts with the locals. We just begin to relax, soaking up the last of our Cat Ba island atmosphere and just as we sat back we noticed the crazy Vietnamese chick who lives in Newtown and supposively teaches French. We saw her on the back of a moto and just when we had though she haddn´t seen us....

'HEY FRIEND!' ..'HA'

She is so loud and continuosly laughs at absoluely nothingto the point where you just have to stare at her and you feel a little uncomfortable. She raves on in spasmotic fits of excitement about the cost of living just like and Australian pensioner living in the back of Warrawong, she blabbs on about the 5 cent bargin peanuts, and that we had paid double for the same boat fair as her the other day.
We met her in HaiPhong on one of those alful slow boats, we actually, we met her in the boat directors office while waiting for the slow boat for two hours drinking shout after shout of the directors homemade family recipe rice wine (that blew your head off) Then, she was with Albert, an unfortunate German man, triple her age who had a child and a girlfiend up in Sapa. He says Mika (the crazy lady) only travells with him for his money. Mika tells me she dumped him because he shoots up, which looked pretty obvious to us. Anyhow, we where just kicking back and she shows up with a much younger German character who turned out to be quite nice... if only we could have warned him!

The beer stalls on the street dont have any toilets so we waddled up to the kiwi bar and had two shots of vodka just to use the loo and then set out to find a restaurant. It turns out we always seem to find the best restaurant on the last night of our stay. it was called Vien Dong, up past the main supermarket. It was jam packed with fish tanks full of fresh seafood. There didnt seem to be any menu, and the family where all sitting around a large table eating there dinner. We looked in and when they all gave us a friendly smile we sat down to order.

The beer was average, sometimes it tastes like soap, so was the restaurant - filled with petrified frog and snakes in jars - but the food was amazing. saute squid, tender in a spicey tomato sauce with chunky onions and a hint of confit garlic. We were not very hungry but we just had to try another dish. More squid in a delish garlicey sauce. Mmm. They where obviously proud of there cooking, they keep on asking us 'if we like' smiles, more smiles, and we told them is was the best food in Vietnam.

We left for the supermarket for some beer and chocolate to help us in packing tonight. I would have changed my mind to stay another night just to eat in that restaurant again, but we have already organised to check out. Tomorrow we join the end of another tour group, our way of getting back to Hanoi, so we have to tolerate fellow travellers again and be polite and have meaningless converstation with strangers - 'I dont know you, and I'm particularly not interested to hear about all your travelling tales, how you concured the world, your 'living the dream', giving your 20 cents to the locals, making all the difference to their economy'
How rude of me...!

My favourite photo this far. I call it 'Corn Lady' She walks the strip selling loads corn steamed fresh on the cob, this is her stopping for buisness out the front of the beer stalls late one night.

Nimh Bimh in shit. SHIT. Small dirty city with absloutely no interest. No interest at all. Except for Tam Coc and Hoa Lu, the two surrounding towns offering the most gorgeous sweeping paddy fields and bizzare lime stone rock formations, many pagodas and many temples.

The next day we hired a moto to explore the outer areas. First we asked if anybody ever gets lost.

"NO, Never!, NEVER!" he laughed

With our new found confidence and our crap map we were lost just after the first 100 meters. I was the elected driver as I was the small bit a farm girl and all....but with Sam on the back and with gravity taking hold, I simply could not hold the thing up at the lights!
Sam took over the reins and did a stella job driving though the stinking over-populated traffic combined with the clear lack of road rules, helmets and indicators.
He sped through the streets with on the wrong side of the road (well, for us Aussies it is) with his cranky girlfriend screaming orders from all sides! The traffic was freakishly amazing. We managed two laps of the city in peak hour knowing our soul aim was to exit and find the peacefull backroads. We almost died. No exaggeration! We almost did! A crazy pink bus emitting an illegal amount of toxic waste was frantically swerving in and out of the traffic trying to kill us. After sucking in the clouds of black smog left in its trail, the air finally lifted and we found ourselves being comfronted with on-coming traffic.(AAAAHHHH)The bus swerved 3 or 4 more times I think, I dont know now, it all seems like blur , but it was definately trying to kill us.
We now consider our lives much more precious as most people do once they have a brush with death. Three days later and I am still in shock and am experiencing reoccuring dreams of my helmetless head being squashed under a crazed truck drivers wheel at the intersection where the policeman in the peach uniform was seriously pointing at Sam for running red lights and for god know what else! I mean, who is going to take him seriouly when he is wearing a pastle pink uniform? I mean really.

Tam Coc was absolutely beautiful. They called it the Halong Bay on land with giant bolders rising out of the paddy fields. At first I was dissopointed we had to drive all the way along the highway to find it instead of going the senic route, but later a lady kindly pointed us in the right direction though the dirt tracks and under the caves to find Hoa Lu. The main attractions in Hoa Lu are the Pagodas and the temples. We drove out following all the signs and ended up on a desolate dirt track in the middle of nowhere. Oh well, we checked out the goats and the women with shaved heads and then finally found our way to the temple. The temples where the same as every other temple we have seen so far. At this point we decided temples arnt for us. No more temples.
We found a little cove where the locals paddle you along the river inbetween all the paddys and under the caves. It was very beautiful except you can expect to run into hordes of other tourists that do a day trips from Hanoi. They row you about 6 to 7 kilometers under 3 massive caves, the largest one being 137 meters long where the tempature can drop 5 degrees! On the way back they try to flog you their embroidery and postcards then then ask for tips. All in all it was a great day.

Its been a small gruelling journey into HiaPhong.
We decided on the 'slow boat' instead of the 'hydrofoil' and saved ourselves 60,000 dong. The boat was smelly and full of 'off-their-face' Vietnamese construction workers who continuously stared quite rudely.
After the very uncomfortable boat trip of 3 hours we arrived at HiaPhong. I patiently waited untill all the eel juice was splattered out the door over my feet and while the next set of workers boarded before I could get off. The usual moto rip-offs occured then we found ourselves in a city where we felt like complete aliens.

I have never in my life walked down the street and have everybody look. Not only did they look, but they stared. Not only did they stare but they stared for a very very long time. The children yelled 'hello, hellooo' causing more attention and the young boys pointed and laughed. A lady even picked up her small child so she could see me from a higher view!
Whats wrong with us! Are we ugly? Maybe its our clothes? We asked the taxi driver who spoke english just fine but he avoided the question. Maybe he didn't want to be rude.
So with this constant awkward attention I gradually became very uncomfortable. I tried to make light of it, being overly nice to people, and smiling a lot, poking my tongue out at the kids, most of the time it worked, but as the sun went down we really started to dislike being the oddballs in a strange city.

The supermarket as our safeguard, we dawdled about in hope to find something agreeable so we could go back to our hotel room and hide hideous bodies from the rest of the world.
The supermarket was the best one yet. We spent a total of $12 and that included pate, 4 breadrolls, a small loaf of bread, salami, sweets and a bottle of vodka! Barginatious. Still, we couldnt make our breadrolls without tomato, which the supermarket, inconveniently, did not stock.
Lucky us, we stumbled upon the market street. Sam keenly spotted some sausage from a lady across the road. It was dark now and she was set up under a torch light. She looked like she had been standing there for a week. She held out her arm to offer us some stuffed pork trotter from a grimey rusted up cleaver. It wasnt bad. We opted for the pork belly with cripsy skin and the greasy grisly black sausage which she erratically smached into pieces on her festering chopping board before stuffing it into reused plastic bags for us to take home.
Happy with our purchases we finally headed back to our cheap and musty hotel room, hoping our passport and money was still there. It was. We played canasta, ate sausage sangas and went to sleep.

The morning after.......
I guess your waiting to hear of some horrible food poisioning story, how very shamefull of you sitting on the edge of your seat eagerly waiting to hear how I was bent over the toilet bowl all night and twisting and turning in bed with excruciating pain, well ha HA. Sam and I can survive ANYTHING. We have stomachs of STEEL. We are masters of our of intestines. We have successfully adapted our systems to prolonged feeding of unidentifiable phenomenon. We reign SUPREME.

I am deffinately starting to look like a traveller. Dirty clothes, dirty hair, thong tan. But gosh, I am really starting to smell like a traveller. Phew. My shorts smelt so bad yesterday that I almost threw up! At home, I would have soaked them for a week. I wore them today anyway. I figure everything around me smells much much worse so nobody will know the better.

We managed to catch the bus to Nimh Bimh, so happy not to be staying in HaiPhong another night. It was a local bus, filled with local people. One lady couldnt give me the peace sign enough and of course everybody else was picking their nose. When the lady with the bad teeth boarded we started to worry we would miss our stop but then we saw the driver throw a man off followed by his bike being pegged from the roof. I guess they will tell us when its our stop.
He did, and after all my freaking out from the dirty curtains touching my head and suffocation from grotesque Vietnamese flatulence I was more than glad when we finally arrived into Nimh Bimh.

I've had a toxic night, we did the typical thing; plan to go out for dinner, forget to have dinner, go to a bar, come back to hotel hungry, broke and drunk.

We loved the feel of Cat Ba Island and have decided to come and chill out on the island for a few days. The Junk was happy to drop us off, just give them a call and they'll pick us up and take us back to Hanoi.

We have discovered new drinking spots on the island and have found a NZ run bar called 'The Flightless Bird' where I swapped my book and had my first Vodka. Dissapointed with the lack of a pool table we walked along the bay and found the 'Koala Bar', of course an Australian run bar run by a guy from Sydney who sports the most ridiculous haircut. I won the first game of pool and looking forward to not being 'game bitch' if I win. Two half Aussie and half Pom Harry Potter lookalike kids from Hong Kong took over our game halfway through! They kept us entertained for a while until sam eyed the Wild Turkey up high on the shelf. We haven´t seen a sight like that for a while. The next thing I know I´m drinking 20c beers with the locals, peeing in the gutter and eating 4 dollar baguettes full of diahorrea bugs.

Today we spent most of it bed watching crappy MTV shows. We finally felt well enough to walk up and down the strip cheaking out some of the menus. We spotted some Goat and Sea Snails, couldn't do that today. Fried noodles and Springrolls. We checked out the markets and found the strangest creature in a tank in a dodgy restaurant nearby. Looked like an Armadillo cross stringray. Very strange, I've never seen anything like it. We came across some IPOD speakers although the lady tried to charge us $90 US! We told her we saw them for $10 in Hanoi and when we went to walk away she said OK $10, $10! We said no way!, Look at your profit margin! Im sure she doesn't know what a profit margin is. She had the shits anyhow.

So, now Ím on a detox. I have successfully grown a beer belly and now sleep thoughout the day. If we stop drinking so much we might see more of the island. No more grog for me!