Cat Ba Fucking Island with a hint of monsoons

Nice scenery, nice weather for a day or two, bad.. everything else. Amazing how much trouble some people are willing to let you go through just in order to get a few bucks and your wrath to go with it. Be it arranging a bus trip, boat ride, motorcycle, food, beverage.. as long as there is money involved they are not shy about making it hard for you. Take for example my trip to the beautiful Ha long Bay and the Cat Ba islands. Smooth minibus ride to the coast and then the trouble begins. Boat ride to the island would have been fine if the tour guide hadn't been asking me every twenty minutes would we care to take the buss to the city once we arrive. No we don't want no ride, we'll figure it out for ourselves. Prices come down, temper gets high. LEAVE US ALONE DAMN IT! Bus rides to from the pier to the city cost you around 50 000dong on a bus and 100 000 on a bike. Naturally buses are all reserved for the actual tourist and no cheapskates are wanted so that leaves the only option to be XE OM's. Those ghastly drivers and their prices didn't really flatter us at the start so we tried to organize one of the hotels to send a rescue ship (bus) to the.. well rescue. No dice with the reception so we sadly have to succumb to the prices of those ghost riders of Cat Ba Islands.



I've been referring to I, me and us. Us being me and Sas. Yes the lovely girl finally made it to the country and everything has been awesome! Still getting to know each others quirks and such so nobody has been strangled just yet. Continuing with the horrors...



Hotel is good and cheap so no problem there and the forecast send us to the beach the next day. A small and quiet beach was really in order but there was something afloat. That being garbage. Lots of it too. Between the ever annoying seaweed you could clearly make out plastic bags, tiny straws, small ropes, tin cans and of course who could forget condoms. I decided to help the locals clean up the strip a bit but that really is just a temporary solution to a much bigger problem. See the crap there isn't brought there by people who come to the beach but instead it comes with the waves from the ocean. God knows how much shit there are lying at the ocean bottom. Problem is most of the locals are not educated enough to understand that it is a real that needs to be dealt with.



Next day I decided to rent a bike to ride through the island in search of some sightseeing. Nice ride and some 40 k later I'm back at the hotel with the bike. Bike not being my real favor of choice on transportation I decided to trash it to the closest wall next to the hotel and take out a tiny oven and a advertisement sign with me. Result is one slightly battered bike, destroyed oven and a bruise on the advertisement owned restaurant workers leg. Bill is 50 Euros for everything and some bad looks from the locals. Guess these things happen was my thoughts exactly when I went back to the hotel room to do some little sobbing of my own.



Then its time to leave the island. We are about board the ship back to the mainland only to find that my passport was left at the hotel reception. The tout tells us eagerly that it can be send on to same day to us in Hanoi but I'm really in no mood to find that when it arrives there will be a ridiculous service charge hanging on to my passport. So back to the hotel vie bus and stay one more day.



Finally we make it back to the mainland only to find that trouble lurks around the corner or should I say above us? We get the first real taste of the monsoons when a huge rain shower starts hitting the streets of Ha Long City. People seek shelter under any little piece of plastic they can find, gutters cough up water like a asthmatic having a seizure and any attempt to switch destination ends up being a lesson in swimming. Not to leave any cliffhangers, the rain follows us back to Hanoi where motorcycles battle it out with the streams of brown water that reach the bikes headlights. Today its time to head back to Sapa as we are about to cross the border to Laos from the northern part of Vietnam.

More pictures at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/timo.laaksonen/

Chillout and bikeout

Sorry for the short absence of the blog for the last few weeks but I've been busy... doing nothing. Yes Vietnam is my home address for the next couple of weeks as the lovely miss Vassie will be arriving here to make life on the road more intresting. Destinations include at least the world heritage site Halong Bay or more likely its little brother which is not so turistic. But before I start to tell what the future holds in store for us I would like to tell whats happend since I left Japan.



Actually leaving Japan felt kinda like leaving home again because Shanghai and Japan both felt so close to the western way of life that it could be compared to home and Vietnam was definately not goig to be all that. I managed to screw up on reading the time table for my scheduled departure from Osaka and spend 24 h at the airport! Fortunately for me the place had its own manga kissa where you could use the Internet, read comics, drink beverages and eat a shitload of icecream. Hurrah for the Japanese subcultures!



I arrived Hanoi at 9 PM local time which ment that not alot of busses were heading out the city. For some reason you couldnt change your money to Vietnamese dong at the Osaka airport and it was even a bigger suprise when I found out that the foreign currency exchange office was closed at the Hanoi airport. That leaves me with hundreds of dollars and alot to hope for. Fortunately dollar is a payable currency in Vietnam so I manage to get a taxi to the host I'm staying with in Hanoi, another couchsurffer. Mark is a university professor who has pretty much done and seen it all. Being a traveler for 4 years all around the world can leave a man with alot of stories to tell. He hosted me for a week at his pad which offered free wakeup calls in the form of jackhammers and motorbike horns from 7 AM in the morning.



As for Hanoi I can say only that its not much of a tourist town. Great bars and cafes and tons of lovely cheap local food but other than that it was just a place for me to catch up on some reading. I want to do it properly when my counterpart arrives here :). Managed to read two books during that week. The first being a one man adventure story about survival on your own without money, accomodation or transportation called Into The Wild. A decent book to read while your traveling but doesnt reach my top 5 books so far. The other book was of corse the one I've been trying read for a month now, George Orwel's 1984. God what book. Hope we wont have to endure anything of that sort in our lifetime although there are some signs in the air...



Anyway after one week of staying in Hanoi I decided to check out the lovely hill station in the northern Vietnam called Sapa. Filled all around with gigantic hills and local minorities making it a place deffo worth visiting. The day of arrival I checked in to a cheap hotel headed out to the local villages near the town. At the bottom of the valley lies the village of Cat Cat with waterfalls and rivers running through the villages, creating small ponds where to swim, relax and bathe in the sun. Most tourist decided only to look from a distance and take pictures so it was a really great experience mixing with the local kids in their water sports (throwing rocks into the water next to people to get them wet).



Also managed to meet two italian guys named Criss and Gabri with whom we spend the next day cruising the countryside with motorbikes and getting into some sticky situations on the outskirts of Sapa. Basically we went on a dirtroad that supposedly lead to a minority village but the road was so bad we had to dump the bikes midway where we talked to some local folk. After the visit we came back to the bikes to find them a bit out of shape and took a while to find out that the locals (god knows for what reason) had made some adjustment to the bike that made them run like shit. After a little figuring out we managed to fix the problems and drived into the sunset like the cowboys we are! Now its time the head back to Hanoi to meet my beautiful girlfriend who will be here in a matter of days!



More pictures at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/timo.laaksonen/