Halong Bay

After a Sherlock Holmes like investigation to find THE Sinh Cafe - which mushroomed to an incredible number of copy-cats after being mentioned by Lonely Planet as the most reliable travel agent, we took a bus to discover Halong Bay on the 15th of May without the "help" of a travel agent.

Taking a bus to Halong city from Hanoi is not a big deal and if you arrive before noon you have a good chance to hop on one of the thousands tourits boats for a tour around the bay or to Cat Ba Island. Of course we did not arrive before 2 pm, so we could choose between a private boat trip for 1 million VND and upwards, or spend a night in Halong city, which is described by our guide as an option to avoid. We did not have to consider the first option and the second was not so bad after all; it is an oversupplied tourist town for the local crowds with an OK beach and overpriced restaurants - which is not much different from the establishments we found later on Cat Ba Island. Hence the following day we took a toursit boat for less than half the price the agents started selling it (do not fall for the compulsory insurance without which you are not allowed to enter the boat, nor the tax or the Red Little Riding Hood they will come up next to lure you into further expenses). The bay is truly wondeful; as if God played dice with rocks and threw hunreds of islands to the sea, which accidentally landed on their sides (most of them are greater in height than latitude).

Arriving to the island we soon understood that we are the only ones making the effort on our own putting ourselves into a not too favourable negotiation poition with the local bus and motorbike maffia. I will waste some of my thoughts on this very educative event in order to possibly save fellow travellers from similar excercises: as an individual traveller your first option is to agree with the tour group to give you a lift to the city still on the boat (matter of fact 18 km from the harbor, but you will hear everything up to 60 km if you listen to the local mob). Your second option is to take the local bus, which is the cheapest and most reasonable solution unless you let yourself bullied and not allowed to enter the public bus by the same mob. You third option is really miserable - get a lift on a scooter or a minibus for double the price of the roughly 300 km return trip between Hanoi and Halong city. Well, you can imagine that our two men little commando voted for the most extreme action after being forcefully deprived from all options and followed by the scooter drivers to threaten all possible by-passers willing to give us a lift for less than their price when we walked out on them. Our solution was far from elegant, but served all of us right: I stopped the last passing minibus, agreed their outrageous price, declined to pay them in advance and upon arrival Tomek told them we were not paying unless they call the police to clear things up. He also took photos of the driver and the bus which flipped them out so much thet they would have rather left without any payment then get into further trouble. We collected a pretty audiance and interpreters for the scene...at some point it looked like they will pay us to get lost and not make any more trouble with police. At the end we payed them some money just to clear things up which they were reluctant to take :)

We spent the following day in perfectly opposite mood - on the remote and peaceful Cat Co 2 beach, which was apparently our "private" beach for the whole day, reading, swimming and chilling the whole day. However attractive would have been to stay one more day for a trek in the national park, we decided to leave and spare time for other parts of Vietnam.

Though we are still in the awakening stage to get a grip on the magnitude of the phenomena of cheating and lying in every single possible interaction. Hard to swallow, but probably one should just think beyond the worst intention whenever someone approaches you. For instance it is quite possible that a bus pushes another off the road and then the driver threatens the passengers with a hammer to disembark and get on his bus. This is not science-fiction, it happened today on our way back to Hanoi! Fortunately we were on the bigger bus.