18th April 2010
We awoke this morning to find the karsts of Ha long Bay shrouded in fog, giving it a mysterious, other-worldy air. We had been hoping to witness it in sunshine, but failing this, to see the ghost like forms rising from the sea was the next best thing.
We transferred to Cat Ba Island. This was used as an army base during the war and the Vietnamese army actually made one of the island’s caves into a 16 bed hospital, protecting it from American bombs.
The minibus took us to Cat Ba National Park. This is an important national park where the landscape is dominated by karst limestone islands, like Ha Long Bay. We took the path to the summit of Mount Cao Vang, 331m above sea level, well most of the way anyway. It started as a paved flat path, developed into some steep stone steps and then to a level path with paving slabs at intervals. So far so good. The problems begain when we lost the paving slabs and the extremely muddy and slippery path started to climb. Then we had old iron ladders at stages with broken, rusty handrails, covered in mud where people had climbed ahead of us. The path got worse and worse and we got muddier and muddier until we reached a vertical ladder going up the side of a rock. As we reached the bottom there were some people coming down. When asked whether it was worth the climb, they said all you could see was white. On a clear day you get a panoramic view of Ha Long Bay, but although the weather was brightening it was still shrouded in cloud at the summit. We decided to give it a miss and quit while we were ahead and uninjured, so descended to wait for our guide at the bottom. By the time we arrrived back at the bus stop, the bottoms of my trousers were caked in orange mud. I don’t think they’ll ever be the same again.
Once the whole tour group had come back down the mountain, we boarded the minibus to the harbour on the other side of the island. Here we transferred to a small boat with two other couples and took a 20 minute journey to Monkey Island, passing another, larger floating village along the way.
We had been looking forward to our beach bungalow experience on Monkey Island. Unfortunately, when we arrived, the place was more a building site than a resort. There were about 6 beach bungalows to one side of the main bar area and a few more set back from the ocean on the other side. They were in the process of finishing the two story bar block and putting more beach bungalows behind this and to the side of the existing ones, over the water.
Firstly, they tried to put us in a bungalow that was more in the forest behind the resort than on the beach in front of it. We could barely hear the sea from here, much less see it, so we had a word to our guide who arranged for us to be moved to a beach front bungalow, which is what we had booked.
Suitably installed in our bungalow where we could sit on the balcony and look out at the beautiful view and fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves, we grabbed a kayak. We headed around to the next bay where the monkeys that the island takes its name from were sat on the beach. We didn’t go onto the beach, content to watch them from the kayak close to shore. We continued on around the island until we arrived back at our little beach. Unfortunately, the electricity had been turned off while we were out and so there were no lights and no hot water for a shower. Part of the consequence of staying on a building site I guess. I went and had a word with the first man I saw who initially told me to wait until 4pm. Knowing about Vietnamese time keeping I insisted it was turned back on now rather than later and about 20 minutes later we heard the generator start up.
The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing and admiring the view, which was wonderful. It was just a shame about the nail gun going off in the background :D.
The evening meal was a delicious seafood barbecue, sat on a balcony overlooking the sea.
We turned in for an early night after sitting on the beach for a while and did indeed fall asleep to the sound of the waves gently crashing on the shore.