After Hanoi we decided to travel to Halong Bay and stay at the main island called Cat Ba. Only a four hour journey door to door, including a ferry, the scenery is phenomenal. We decided to stay there instead of taking a two or three day tour from Hanoi itself. The town Cat Ba closely resembles part of the Spanish Costa Del Sol, but if you get a room like we had (4 stories up), the views are breath taking. There surely aren't many places in this world that can compare to scenery on offer around Cat Ba and Halong Bay.
On our first full day, we went for a day long boat trip around the islands. The trip turned out to be great fun; starting with the floating village and then making our way towards what seemed to be a secret cave in a tiny island. The entrance looked like something from Lord of the Rings, and as we entered it grew into an opening and finished at a clearing with a turquoise pool at its centre.
We then had a great lunch with the Belgians and an Ozzy couple on the top deck of the boat. It was a delicious feast with fish, morning glory, spring rolls and steamed rice. Unluckily for the Ozzy couple, who had to remind the tour guides they were veggies and couldn't eat meat, just got given more fish. Although this was bad news for them, it meant more tasty grub for us to tuck into!
The next day on Cat Ba we hired some mopeds and went to explore the island with the Belgians. We started at an old fort that overlooked the main fishing port in Cat Ba town. Our guide was a young Vietnamese women who was really informative and enthusiastic. The fort was built by the French and later took over by the Vietnamese to protect the precious town on Cat Ba. The guide told us that Cat Ba when translated means island of women because the female Vietnamese processed the fish during the war.
We then visited a cave that had been turned into a bunker to protect the islands residents from bombs during the war. Although the cave was interesting, the best part of the visit came at the end as we were leaving and setting up to take a few shots of the steel reinforced exit. It was Lottie that got the first sighting and it took the rest of us a few seconds to realise what was happening. Originally we just saw a frog, it wasn't moving quickly or reacting to our voices; although when you looked at where it had come from you could see a long thin cobra poised to devour its prey. The guide suddenly told us not to move and called his friend who came up with a machete and a thick cloth. Unluckily the snake had gone back into the rocks, presumably because of the commotion so the man hung up the frog and told us to leave. We thought he'd set a trap to rid the tourist attraction of a poisonous resident, but in actual fact it's because they use them in alcoholic drinks to boost fertility in men. You can sell 1 kg of cobra for 200,000 dong, roughly £65. A tidy profit for the snake hunter!
After Cat Ba we decided to travel further down then coast to a place called Hue and stayed at the Google Hotel. We spent two nights here where we went on a demilitarised zone (DMZ) tour and visited the Imperial City. The DMZ tour was really interesting and explained the divide between North and South forces during the war. Our tour guide grew up throughout the war and told us real stories about his personal experiences.
We were then taken to the Vinh Moc tunnels. An extensive tunnel complex used in the war to shelter the villagers of Vinh Moc from the bombing. The tunnels are 30 metres underground, making them dark, damp and encroaching (at 5ft4 Lottie was even crouching)! At the time of the war, approximately 350 villagers lived underground for 6 years - amazingly, sharing just one bathroom between them!
To cap off our stay in Hue, the Google hotel served free local beer between 5pm and midnight. We had met a Mancunian couple that day on the tour and they came over to our hotel to make the most of the free beer. It resulted in a pool match, boys vs. girls with the girls coming out victorious 2-1. We haven't let them live it down quite yet!
This was our last stop in the North before entering Southern Vietnam, we will be reporting from there soon!
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