D13: Hạ Long to Cát Bà

February 16, 2018

I love the way the giant sheer cliffs tower over the buildings

There was a promise of a free breakfast included with my hotel room. There was also a promise that finding open food places on Tet was going to be difficult. As a result, I made an effort to wake up early and go down and get breakfast. I'm trying to think if I can remember any hotel breakfasts I've eaten that were worse than this one. I'm not sure I can. I'm not even sure I can remember hotel breakfasts that I've decided not to eat which were worse than this. Really the only thing that had me eating this at all was the fear that if I didn't get food now, I might find myself again going all day without.

I saw this woman with sweet potatoes almost immediately after I left the hotel. They were excellent with the butter I took from the buffet.

The toaster oven which was being used to toast the sliced white bread and the sliced 'sausage' wasn't very warm, even at it's warmest setting. The Aussie family that was down at the same time as me managed, with great effort, to get a few slices of bread to actually become lightly toasted. Generally, however, the oven served to pull the moisture out of the bread and make it go stale rather than toast it. Even the strawberry jam that was supposed to go on the 'toast' was pretty lame.

I decided that going to a heavily touristy area that attracts a lot of foreigners would be a good bet for finding open lodging and restaurants so I set my sights for the day on Cát Bà Town. Being just 60km away including a 7.5km ferry, I didn't see any need to get started right away so I went back to the room, glared balefully out the window at the rubbish weather, and crawled back into bed.

I rode along back roads to the bridge connecting either side of Hạ Long. When I came this way in 2006, the bridge was still under construction and it was necessary to take a ferry. Wandering around looking for how to get up to the bridge from down below, I spotted a sign for a pagoda and thought "I'll go take a look at that" but it seemed the rest of the population of Hạ Long had the same idea and I rapidly decided that Vietnamese pagodas probably weren't that interesting to me after all.

In China I would stop and spend ten minutes reading everything on the stone inscription and I would know what this was. Illiteracy sucks.

I would later stumble across a small Chinese-ish temple. Knowing as I now do that Vietnamese was written using a Chinese character based script until well into the 19th century and that the Latinate quốc ngữ script only took off in the 20th century, there is no reason to believe that the Chinese temple inscriptions along the walls and columns were actually written in Chinese. There was a woman sitting in the front who seemed to not be an in-and-out again quick visitor who spoke a little English and a little less Chinese.

Compared to the door guards in Chinese temples, this guy looks so chill... "hey man, how ya doin'?"

Why is it that no one in Asia seems capable of sculpting a tiger that looks like a tiger?

Leaving the temple, I found my way up to the bridge. I was determined to ride the small roads rather than the main motorway as far as possible along the way to the Cát Bà Island ferry but I messed up at one point (an error I try to tell myself I just as likely would have made even if I had successfully gotten paper maps by now) and I still ended up on the motorway.

That was dull.

I'm in the lane for bicycles and horse drawn carts

Even the leaden sky can't dull the brightly colored buildings

This bridge was financed by JBIC and finished in November of 2006

On the plus side, I found a stall making grilled banh mi sandwiches and I saw two touring cyclists on the other side of the road.

Nothing much of interest between there and the ferry. It looks like this road used to wind quite a bit more and there were a number of little oxbowed off stretches of houses, restaurants, and little hotels had I wanted to explore. With no idea of the departure times of the ferry, however, I mostly just wanted to get there.

The Vietnamese variation of the döner kebab

I had at least 45 minutes to spare from when I arrived to when we left. Spent most of that time either chatting with two motorcycle tourers from the Netherlands or trying to figure out how to turn the flash on on my camera. It was quite a proud moment of success when I finally convinced the sodding stupid thing to not automagically turn the fill flash on for me without asking and now, despite quite a lot of reading through the menus, I can't figure out any way to take flash photos. Flash is just off. (The only positive this camera has is how small and light it is.)

Halong Bay Boat Tour boats leaving the terminal behind me

Long ferry across to the island. I'd guess close to an hour. Stunning scenery but again, leaden gray skies dulled it quite a bit. Finally, finally after getting on to the island, the sun came out. There was even enough sunlight that branches and leaves cast shadows on the ground. This made me ever so very happy.

I'm pretty sure cutting this closely across the path of a boat would be enough to get a commercial captain in trouble in the US or Europe

The Netherlander motorcyclists in the background and two Russians in the foreground

One thing I don't do when I travel with a companion is insist on getting photos of myself standing in front of things

With every passing kilometer closer to Cát Bà Town, the number of white faces passing by on motorcycles increased. There were even two Spaniards on rental mountain bikes that didn't fit them very well. I tried to ride with them but I couldn't make my bike go that slow on the flat parts, and they kicked my ass on the uphills.

Pleasant conversations with random other tourists made me realize how desperate the past few days have made me for people I can talk to.

The amount of money it must have cost to cut these roads into the karst is mind boggling

Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 554 km (344 miles)

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