Living the Good Life: Cat Ba Island

From the folks at World Vet Adventures....i.e. Jared and Roberta, we apologize for this ridiculously long hiatus from blogging. Somewhere along the way (perhaps our third time through Thailand) we got so behind we kind of threw in the towel and figured we'd get the blogs churned out in no time once we were back in Canada with 'good internet.' Well, here we are 8 1/2 months after arriving home and we haven't done a single blog.....shit. But all is not lost, we kept a journal and have so very many pictures we need to share! So here goes, a bit of a trip down memory lane for us, and we promise to be better next time....
We return now to your regular viewing:

Hello all,
In real life, we took a night bus up to Hanoi, spent an afternoon, then another night bus to Sapa, spend a few days, then a night bus to Cat Ba, which is what this blog is about. Then we bussed back to Hanoi and spent a few days there before leaving for Laos. However, we squished those two separate Hanoi experiences into one blog, the next in the sequence. Not that any of this matters, I'll get back to the good stuff.

Lots of people had told us about how beautiful Halong Bay was, but it was a shame because so many people go there, of all ages, and they had ruined the experience with the myriad of boats and noise. The 'cool kids' will tell you to go to Cat Ba, and explore the other side of the bay; same scenery, less developed, less people. We're in. We took a night bus from Sapa (I know, can't get enough of these things) and it was actually quite posh. There were about 5 seats in the back that all reclined in a row so it was the closest thing to a bed on a bus we'd seen yet and we thought we were living quite high.
We got to Halong harbour and from here had to taxi to a different/ less touristy harbour where we would catch a boat for Cat Ba. We had been warned in the Lonely Planet that they run a scam where you catch the ferry just in time to miss the last bus on the other side. We figured we were fine because it was still first thing in the morning and had time to get across. Unfortunately, when we got to the harbour we learned the next bus bound for Cat Ba Island wasn't leaving until 3 pm. So we trounced all over the two sides of the harbour and finally found some guys that would take their little boat over for us. The saga continued on the other side as we had to haggle for a couple of moto taxis to take us over to the other side of the island where Cat Ba town (and our hotel) actually were. It ended up costing way more this way, but eventually we got over and it was all good.
We lounged around that day, but made a plan to do some kayaking in the bay the next day. Here's some pictures:

Some people live out in the bay on floating houses, raising fish in cages under their homes

The next day we grabbed some scooters and decided to make a loop around the island (it's pretty small).

We were just about to the end of the smallest loop when we came across a pile of boulders on the road. The work crews were using explosives and I think they got a little over-zealous. So we had to turn around and go pretty much the entire way back to Cat Ba town. From there, we headed up the only other road on the island towards the National Park. National parks in SE Asia are kind of weird, this one had a bunch of monkies caged up as you walked down a road going apparently nowhere.

Eventually we came to a trailhead and started walking in the jungle. We took the Ngu Lam Peak walk for about 1 1/2 hours and ended up on top of the jungle- with some amazing views.

On the drive back we toured a hospital that had been carved out of the inside of a mountain- completely safe from air attacks during the Vietnam War. I had foolishly assumed a place as remote as Cat Ba Island wouldn't have even been involved in the fighting but that was obviously not the case. We walked through the narrow tunnels and got an appreciation for how incredibly hard the Vietnamese people had to work to win the war.