Cat Ba island - mark one (stinks of fish)

We got up at 6am and caught a bus to Hue airport. A wonderful, easy and quick flight later we arrived in Hanoi before 9am. We jumped straight into a taxi which took us to a bus station. We should have realised we'd made a mistake when we had an argument with the taxi driver about where he was taking us, but nevertheless we had decided to get to Cat Ba island (in Halang Bay - the coastline with all the jagged rocks that you see in postcards) on recommendation from Rob and Meg, under our own steam, rather than take a tourist trip.

We then caught a bus to Haiphoung then a motorbike to the ferry, but missed the ferry in front of us as we didn't have enough cash on us (no ATMs on Cat Ba) and had to get some money out. Not to mention it was lunchtime and we were starving and all there was to eat was a pot noodle stall selling vastly overpriced water and noodles, that tasted like a pot noodle back home. So we eventually got another bus to a different ferry after being stung for about 50% more than we should have paid and got a ferry to Cat Ba island, then another bus ride to Cat Ba town itself. Sadly, half the island has been designated a national park so they have utterly devastated the other half by quarrying half the stone out to make a road for the ferry terminal.

View towards the ferry
It was horrid. It was firstly reminiscent of the backside of Hong Kong island - with little mountains surrounded by high rise hotels. But Cat BA was at the height of its tourist season - it is like Costa del Vietnam: jam-packaged full of Vietnamese package tourists. It was almost impossible to find a hotel under $25 which is daylight robbery ($10 should get a pretty damn nice room anywhere else in Vietnam).

Finally we found a reasonable hotel and wandered the streets looking for a nice place to eat. We were met with the stink of endless seafood in crummy and dirty-looking places, and surly looks from locals who clearly weren't interested in our money.

We did have a lovely day the next day chilling on the beach, although we did get a bit sunburned...silly silly...but the 2 and 3-day boat trips we had expected to find were vastly overpriced and on really shitty boats with no beds and no shade for the daytime.

The nice part of Cat Ba
When our hotel manager threw us out of the hotel after the second night we cut our losses and bought a ticket back to Hanoi. We were so close to Halang bay you could almost see it from the beach but we realised that all the good trips were arranged in Hanoi and we frankly couldn't wait to get out of that shitty little town.