Jarrod and Sara’s Site

 Hello everybody, sorry to not check in for a while, but we’re in Vietnam and have been real busy and not had much access to the Internet. I hope all of you are doing well and thanks for the emails, its nice to hear what’s going on at home. We are currently experiencing our very first rainy day (in 6 weeks- I’m sorry I know the weather at home has been brutal) at our guesthouse in Hue in Central Vietnam that has free Internet so we’re going to try and catch up on this blog now if we can…

So after our intense few days in Hanoi (Sara is writing about that now I think), we booked a three day/ 2 night tour of Halong Bay to enjoy one of the natural highlights of Vietnam and get out of the city for a while. The tour was really great. We usually try to do things on our own when we can (without a tour) but since we don’t have a boat or the money to charter one, we needed to do a tour here. We were really happy we did though as it was one of the better ones we’ve been on. We were on a boat (see pictures - hopefully) with only 4 other travelers, 1 guide, and the crew of 4. The boat was very large for that number of people, we all had our own room with shower, there was a large common room/dining room, and a large sundeck on top of the boat to enjoy the scenery. The guide we had (Dang) was excellent and was great to spend time with. One of the good things about doing a tour like this is definitely the guide (if you get a good one - which we have had great luck with really good guides on this whole trip) as its one of the best times to get to hang out with a local person who is happy to just talk to you and ask and answer questions without trying to sell you something. He was a great source of information about the area and great to talk to (excellent English). 

The first day was spent traveling into the bay to the spot where we would dock and sleep on the boat for the night. I know talking about the scenery isn’t all that interesting, so hopefully the pictures help, but that was the main activity, sitting up on the sundeck as the boat cruised through the thousands of limestone mountains/cliffs that make up the bay. After arriving at our spot for the night, we went kayaking around the cliffs and into a huge grotto. To get in we paddled through a small tunnel that is only accessible during low tide and emerged inside what is basically like a huge saltwater lake enclosed by the limestone mountains (if you looked from the top, which is open - not like a cave, it would look like a big circle of tall, steep cliffs with ocean inside).  After kayaking, we got back on the boat and had a delicious family style Vietnamese dinner (another great thing about a good tour) consisting of fresh fish, squid, prawns, vegetables, and, of course, rice. Then had a few beers with the guide and other travelers and turned in for a great sleep out on the ocean.

The next day after some more cruising and eating, we were dropped off in a little cove on Cat Ba Island to hike through a section of the National Park. It was a short, steep hike over a small mountain and back down into the valley. The landscape here was really different than on our recent hikes as it was more rainforest like jungle and very rocky. There were also a lot more birds and it was nice to hear the sound of them as on many places we’ve hiked have had no birds due to overhunting. When we got down to the valley we stopped at the one home in this area of the park, which is the small fish/vegetable farm of a sixty year old couple who have been living in this really remote area for about twenty years. They had set up a large net structure in a small lake where they raised/farmed fish to eat and occasionally to sell in town. They had a small orchard where they grew banana and a few other fruit trees. They had a garden where they grew all their vegetables and they had a chicken coupe with a small number of chickens. Their “house” was a really simple, but nice and clean, bamboo open-air hut, with raised levels for sleeping and storage, a table, and fireplace. There we sat and had a snack and tea and admired how simple, but seemingly happy the couple’s life was.

After hiking out of the park and getting back on the boat, we docked at a floating “seafood store” (see picture) for lunch and more kayaking. This place was interesting, basically a large (maybe one 1/3rd of the size of the football field that the undefeated NE Patriots play on, which I have not seen a single game while I’ve been away, and its absolutely killing me - last night our place had a TV station that aired the NFC title game (recorded) then played a montage of every other playoff game besides the Patriots and then instead of playing the recorded Patriots game as it seemed to be gearing up for, they switched to the Tonight Show with Jay Leno - I wasn’t mad at all) floating structure that had about 20 pens with nets that contained different kinds of fish swimming in them (think of the movie Waterworld). Restaurants would come to a place like this and buy the fish for their restaurant. Cool place, but the 4 men that worked there also lived there and only left to go to town about once a month… yikes.

That night we stayed in Cat Ba town at a nice hotel before heading back to land aboard a different boat the next morning. Overall, it was a really nice trip. The place is beautiful, but they don’t seem to be taking very good care of it at all as there are tons of diesel boats cruising around and they don’t seem too concerned with keeping litter and waste on the boats. Hopefully they’ll get it under control and not wreck the bay as its really a unique and amazing place.

After we arrived back in Hanoi, we had about three hours to kill before boarding the Night Train to Sapa… see Sapa blog.

Hope everyone is well.

Jarrod and Sara