Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island

After busing to Halong City from Hanoi we got a boat out to Cat Ba Island passing through the hazy but very picturesque Halong Bay. The area is full of islands all of limestone and forming small steep sided islands that jutt out of the sea and are being eroded at the base by the salt water. They reminded me of the scenery in Vien Viang in Laos which is also karst limestone and looking at a small picture that I drew in my journal it looks exactly the same! The difference is that here they are surrounded by the sea and the bottom is undercut from the action of the waves. They harbour a multitude of caves and we visited a touristed but still interesting one on our way to CatBa where there were loads of interesting shaped stalactites and a main chamber about 1km long!

We passed an area where there were people living on platform boats under the shadow of the islands. It looked very nice, but we reckoned it could become a little isolated for teenagers. We arrived on CatBa and were driven over a very bumpy road that is in the process of being made to CatBa town. We were to discover that there is blasting and roads being built all over the island. The town itself was more developed than I had been anticipating though it is not that large, and there was a harbour full of boats. Many of these were houseboats where people live and there were also smaller taxi boats that rowed people around between the various boats and bays.

We hired motorbikes and rode around the island one day. I got one to ride myself and after felling slightly wobbly soon felt very confident and enjoyed the day. Because of Eric having an accident and Louis staying to help sort it out I ended up with Nicole as my passenger and we headed on with Amir and Marte on our two bikes. The others caught up later. The views from road over the bay and the paddy fields and small beaches were fantastic and the weather was great. The next day we just lay on the nearby beach which had a great walkway around to it. I finished The Lord of the Rings and was very satisfied by the tale!

There were quite a few kids selling postcards and wee plastic hacky / kicking things. We ended up making friends with a couple of them. One wee 10 year old boy in particular (Chi) was very cute and fun. There was also a girl called Hoa who was 15 who really liked hanging out and wanted to learn an English song. She asked me to teach her Jingle Bells, so Eric wrote it out for her and I ended up singing it several times each day!! Funny!