Patrick and Mary Go Round

We’re back in Hanoi after a couple days away in Halong Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage site that includes 3000 limestone cliff islands about 30 km off shore.  To get to Cat Ba island, the only inhabited island in the bay, took a mere four hours, yet was the most complicated and cryptic portion of our travel thus far.  Hanoi has the fix in to get every tourist who wants to visit Halong Bay do so on a tour, so there was absolutely no help for the independent traveler.  We ended up taking a train from the Long Bien train station in Hanoi to Haiphong, where we taxied over to the ferry dock (and got ripped off by the taxi), and then got on the “last boat” going to Cat Ba at 12:30 pm, which was a slow ferry taking 2 hours, only to be passed by a fast ferry (that takes only about 45 minutes to arrive) about ten minutes after our ferry left the harbor.    I mention this for other travelers who are looking for good information on how to get to Cat Ba island by themselves, and are as discouraged as I was about the information in Hanoi and guidebooks as I was about how to do it.  This guy has a good post about DIY to Cat Ba that I found useful.

Anywho, we arrived to Cat Ba and the scene was really amazing.  Zillions of really small islands of just sheer limestone cliffs rising out of the water.  Cat Ba town was nothing particularly special, just a string of hotels, shops, and restaurants built in front of the limestone cliffs.  I think it’s a big destination for Vietnamese during the summer months, but it’s low season so we got great deals on everything. 

Halong Bay and Fishing Boats

We took a trek around Cat Ba National park, which was a really beautiful walk up and down four of the limestone mountains, then passing through a small village of rice fields where we had an awesome lunch from a local house, and then continued on to a small bay where we got on a boat and toured around some of the islands before returning to Cat Ba town.  

Rice Paddies

The town we passed through, incidentally, had four of the cutest puppies I’ve ever seen.  I was so tempted to scoop one up, but then we talked out the difficulty of crossing four more borders with a puppy and then the inhumaneness of a 15 hour plane ride home.  I was consoled by the fact that the animals in the valley were some of the healthiest ‘ve seen on our whole trip - the fattest chickens possible without RBHT. 

The cutest puppies!

I came down with a cold, so we laid low in Cat Ba for another day, and then decided that the cool, humid climate wasn’t going to help a cold so we came back a day early to Hanoi, where all the traffic fumes are sure to help! 

We checked out the Hao Lo prison, aka the Hanoi Hilton, which was obviously bizzare.  This prison was built by the French where they held, tortured, and executed Vietnamese ”revolutionaries” for about 50 years, and then the Vietnamese used it to hold U.S. POWs during the Vietnam War, including John McCain.   It was actually a really well done museum with English explanations of everything.  It was our first experience of propaganda - a whole portion of the museum was about how well the U.S. POWs were treated there (given good food, recreation time, health care, etc.).  Sooo…an interesting experience.

 Tomorrow we are taking an overnight train to Sapa way up north to hopefully do some trekking.