Vietnam – day 3 and 4
Saturday 14.12.2024
Cat Ba
I went to bed too late last night and it’s hard to get up. We wanted to leave at 8am, but only reach breakfast at 8:20am. The lady makes us each an omelet with a dry roll and sweet coffee. It’s really cold out today, about 15°C with light drizzle. Before heading to the ferry we go check out the market. Morning’s the best time. Crowds of people and lots of vendors everywhere.
Supermarkets basically don’t exist here, so you get everything at the market. Or an auntie has cuts of meat laid out anywhere on the street. We buy a bunch of bananas for the road. Jozef would never eat a banana back home, but here, one after another. They’ve got a sweet-sour taste. Then we head off toward the ferry. We choose the route through the middle of the island, for a bit of a change and nice green hills around us.
The trees are pretty broken from a typhoon that hit here two months ago. It’s unbelievably cold on the scooter. Wind-chill’s about 10°C and the scooter takes off another 10. We have to stop for a bit so my hands can warm out. Only a short way left to the harbor. We arrive and there’s already quite a line.
We want to buy tickets, but they’re not selling any. I try to find out what’s going on from a Vietnamese man, but I can’t follow his pantomime. Two Spaniards are waiting there too, they’d already found out what’s happening. The wind’s too strong for the ferry to run, and nobody knows how long it’ll last. So we wait. I tell Jozef this situation would be pretty unpleasant if we had, say, a flight to catch. We haven’t booked anything ourselves. After 10 minutes a guy comes up to ask what’s going on, since his flight leaves in 5 hours from Hanoi. Buses full of tourists are already turning around, and I’m getting hungry, and on top of that there’s the unpleasant cold. So I ask one of the Spaniards, Dany, for his contact, to text me if it starts up, since we’re going to eat. We drive a few kilometers back and go into the first restaurant. We order pho bo beef soup, hoping it’ll warm us up a bit. Instead the lady brings us some kind of pork soup, and it’s not good at all, but we don’t have the energy to sort it out, I was just glad to have something warm, even though I could barely keep it down. And then complete hopelessness set in for me. I texted Dany asking if there’s any update, and nothing. So we give up and head back to the hotel. We get a new room on the 7th floor, I hadn’t even realized it was that tall. It smells a bit of mold and it’s pretty damp there, but at least it’s not cold. We dive under the duvet right away, but just can’t warm up. Only after a good two hours am I finally warm and we go to sleep. We wake up around 4pm and go eat at the same restaurant as yesterday. Along the way we exchange more money, the rate is 1 EUR = 25700 dong. For dinner I have shrimp and Jozef oysters.
I try one too and it’s actually pretty good. At the table next to us is a group of about 10 Vietnamese people doing hotpot (they’ve got a stove with a pot of broth on the table, and they cook all kinds of meat and vegetables in it). They’re washing it down with rice wine they brought in a demijohn. We go for a bit more of a walk around town. At one stall I have a Thai pancake, I need it after today. At the hotel the owner tells us the ferry didn’t run at all today, so I’m glad we only waited there about 1.5 hours. And tomorrow morning she’ll text me whether it’s running or not, so we don’t overreact again. Today wasn’t a great day, but you can’t always have good luck. In the evening I catch up on the blog I fell behind on and go to sleep at least before midnight.
Sunday, 15.12.2024
Cat Ba – Hai Phong – Cao Bang
In the morning at 7am I text the owner about whether the ferry’s running. It is! So we pack fast and go down for breakfast. We have an omelet like yesterday, just I have coffee with milk and Jozef tea instead. When we head outside, it’s noticeably warmer than yesterday, and I’m wearing more layers too. We don’t stop anywhere and head along the coast straight to the harbor. We arrive right on time and board the ferry within 5 minutes.
We eat the bananas we bought last night. Then we head to Hai Phong on the highway, an hour away. We look for a bank before returning the scooter and withdraw 6000000 dong. We don’t know how frequent ATMs will be where we’re heading. We return the scooter, pay an extra 150000 for the extra day, and go for a coffee. Then to the railway station to find out when the train leaves. According to the board, at 3pm and 4:30pm. We ask the lady at the window too, and it’s confirmed. We also try to find out from her which station our train to Cao Bang leaves from, but no luck. I’d looked something up online, so we go to Cao Rau station. Along the way we look for something to eat. In a hidden little alley we find a man cooking fried rice with pork belly, egg and vegetables. Fed, we decide to continue on foot. We watch all sorts of bizarre things, people sleeping on their scooters, a wedding.
We reach where the station should be, but there’s nothing there, so we ask a guy, who directs us to another station 3 km further. We’ve got time, so we continue on foot. We pass more weddings and then reach a residential area. We walk past houses under construction. There are 3 men and 2 women working on one site. I’ve seen a woman near the mixer here several times now. This type of house is genuinely interesting. They’re about 4 m wide and have at least two floors.
The ground floor has glass doors, and they either run a business there or use it as a living room. It was funny watching in the evening how one family was having dinner on the floor and watching TV. We reach the station and ask about the bus to Cao Bang. It leaves at 7pm and a ticket costs 400000 dong per person. We’ve got about 6 hours. So we go look around the area some more. Nearby we find a pub that pours beer, so we go there. Jozef spreads out his work and I write the blog. At the next table there’s already a fairly tipsy group of Vietnamese people, and we share a shot of rice wine with them. Then they head home, on scooters. We stick around for a couple of hours and then go look for a restaurant for food. We can’t find anything suitable, so we go to the station restaurant instead. Then we brush our teeth and board the sleeper bus.
You take your shoes off inside, they give you a bag for them and a blanket. It’s fairly stylish in here, the lights are like something out of a massage parlor. The seats are permanently in a lying position. It’s fine for me, Jozef just has to fold himself in somehow. He decided it was a good idea to tell me how, every time he’s on a bus like this, he thinks about how it would break his legs in a crash. Even so I fall asleep right at the start of the trip, just for an hour though. Then I write the blog. I post it only after midnight and go to sleep a bit more.
