The last few days have involved some serious travelling. On my last blog we'd just arrived in Hue - 4 days later and we're on Cat Ba Island. If you take a gander at the map, you'll see we've covered some serious ground.

Hue was quite a nice place. We went there for the Citadel, but I had pictured it to be a grand castle - akin to Luxembourg or maybe a large Edinburgh Castle. It was nothing like these...the walls were fairly small and of a more Asian (who knew) design which are more elegant and not nearly as intimidating. We spent a very nice day wandering round some of the fortifications and semi-reconstructed buildings.
Our second day involved a trip out on some Easy Riders - our preferred mode of transport. Fiona likes the bikes so much she is intending to add it to her list of things to do when we get home! We visited some Pagodas and some Tombs of Vietnamese Emporers - but nothing particularly breathtaking.

In the evening we jumped on a sleeper bus. Picture if you will a bus with three rows of custom-built single-person bunk-beds. It was nicely set up, the seat angled up and down, you had little drawers to put your things away in and everything. Our only issue was that it was designed for people of a Vietnamese persuasion i.e. it was about 2ft shorter than it needed to be for us to be comfortable! I lucked out, some enterprising fellow had already broken the drawer at the bottom of my bed meaning I had to snuggle my hand luggage but could stretch out at full length. Sadly Fiona spent 10 hours looking as if she had just been prepped to give birth! Photos will follow :D

We arrived in Ninh Binh at 6am the following morning - which was no problem as Vietnam wakes up at 5am (a huge percentage of Vietnam is agricultural, so everyone gets up around 5 to get out before it gets too hot). We checked into our hotel and had a quick snooze before leaping onto another pair of Easy Riders (employees from the hotel this time) who took us to see the local sites. My favourite was a 570-step climb to the top of a Karst hilltop where some enterprising fellows had put a pagoda. The breeze and shade up there gave some relief from the 40C heat and the views were brilliant.

Sadly there wasn't much else to do in Ninh Binh so we booked our bus out of there to Halong Bay and had dinner/drinks. Our trip was to be on one of the local buses and it was going to leave at 6:30 from outside our hotel the next morning. We set our alarm for 6:05 and settled down to sleep.

At 6:06 we had a knock at the door. Turns out the bus arrived early. Thankfully we could pack up in about 5 mins but we got out the door to find a fully packed bus waiting for 'those lazy westerners'. We stepped on the bus to find there were no seats and we stood for a few minutes until some kind soul explained how the seats worked. Basically the bus consisted of two rows of double seats - much like a normal bus. However, if there are not enough seats, you can pull some hooks out of a seat on either side of you and place a spare seat cushion in the middle which extends the seat into one long padded bench of 5! Cracking idea!

Slowly the all-Vietnamese crowd warmed to us and the chat and facination began. No-one believes that I'm 26 (either can I) and we were suitably informed that Scotland is where Drinking, Skirts and Horns come from - there were some very good attempts at miming Whiskey, Bagpipes and Kilts from the locals! :D
Also Fiona is very beautiful with lovely yellow hair and a lovely nose! Ever since, she's been giving her nose extra attention!

We eventually left the bus and grabbed a taxi on the side of the road down to Bai Ca harbour in Halong Bay - which we got to with no problems. Then the mistake, we read the map wrong and got our taxi driver to take us to entirely the wrong part of town. Muchos arguments occured with only raised voices and not much understanding - but the mistake was entirely on our part and if the taxi driver ever comes round to reading this then I apologise wholeheartedly. We eventually jumped out on top of a bridge (think jumping out a taxi in the middle of the Forth Road Bridge) and walked back to where we started.
On the way we met a man who knew fairly good English and knew exactly what we wanted to do. Although this smelt of a scam (especially as we'd just had the taxi episode) we gave it a go. He took us to his office, got us tickets to Cat Ba and took us down to the Tourist Wharf.

At this point we should explain that if we'd just turned left instead of right when we first got into Bai Ca Harbour, we'd have been fine and not needed a second taxi and not got lost and not needed to meet a strange man. Nuts.

At the Tourist Wharf, he introduced us to his associate then scarpered. His associate told us to wait here, then also legged it. Que nervously waiting, swearing that we'd been done and cursing all Vietnamese. Eventually his associate came back and we went to question him. He got us to write our names on a bit of paper, then said we'd need to go and get some tickets from the booth. We explained we'd already paid his boss. He explained we needed to get tickets. We told him we'd already paid his boss. He disappeared again.

Que more cursing, more grumpiness.

Finally, he arrived back with tickets for us which advertised a cost of 40,000 Dong - a 1/4 of what we'd already paid the bossman. Que even more cursing and grumpyness.

It was at this time I went to the ticket counter and encountered someone with excellent English. She explained the tickets were simply passes into the World Heritage Park of Halong Bay which we needed to get in order to take the boat to Cat Ba. She explained that the money we paid the bossman would indeed go to the boat we were about to take to Cat Ba. She explained that everything was fine, and that the boat was due at 1pm.

Bugger.

So there was no scam, no problems and no reason to be untrusting. We apologised to the associate guy as often as we could and he started to understand what our confusion was. The boat arrived at 1pm and we jumped on it - just as we had been told all along. Gosh don't we feel bad about that.

We arrived at Cat Ba island at 5pm after taking a tour of some of Halong Bay and visiting 'The AMAZING Cave Complex' which was little more than a coloured hole in the ground - though caves kinda feel that way after seeing the Jenolan caves in Sydney. From there we took a bus to Cat Ba town.

But we weren't even finished there! As you may have noticed from this, we hadn't had anything planned and this included accomodation. Whilst Fiona sat and drank beer in a cafe with our rucksacks, Tasha (a girl we met on the boat) and I went for a wander to find some place to sleep.

Doing this in Peak Season on a Weekend meant that 7/10 hotels were totally booked out. After an hour I finally found something - instead of a view of the bay though, we have a few of the governmental volleyball court. Such is life.

So quite an epic day. We really don't travel this way most of the time - we like to have things booked a day in advance or so, but this was fun and I'm very surprised we made it all this way. Bus-Taxi-Taxi-Taxi-Boat-Bus, then finding accomodation. Crazy!

We plan to be in Halong Bay for a few days, then head up to Hanoi before we go to China. The plan for that will follow this post.

Off to have a cocktail now peeps and enjoy our view.

Stu