Day 62 - 67: Hoi An (Suits You, Sir!)

Hoi An has a reputation for being the place in Vietnam (and indeed, SE Asia) to go for tailor-made clothes. There are literally hundreds of tailor shops packed into a radius of about 2 square kilometres. With so much choice, it's pretty difficult to know which are good and which are awful. A mere glance at one of the items outside a shop will cause one of the staff to come rushing out to accost you and to try and drag you into their store. The majority of stores are actually just fronts for a factory service; you pick the item and the fabric/colour you want; they measure you up; they send the measurements and the fabric to the factory; it comes back and you try it on; you ask for any adjustments; it goes back to the factory; it comes back and you try it on; you're hopefully happy with it.

I already knew I was going to get a suit or two from Yaly. They had a reputation for being the best tailor in town, and we'd also had recommendations from other people who'd been there. It also turns out that this is where the Top Gear guys came on the motorbike tour to Vietnam. Think I missed that episode.

After being dropped off by the bus outside An Phu hotel who was offering $10 rooms in 3-star accommodation (result!), we were fortunate enough to find that Yaly was on the same road. The place is massive. They do all of their tailoring on-site, and the range of materials on offer is mind-blowing. They can do anything: you have a favourite dress/shirt/pair of shoes? They can replicate it, and probably with better quality material and stitching. You see something you like in a catalogue or online? They will make it for you. When our lottery numbers come in, I'm going to come here for a month and get an entire wardrobe or two made up. The materials are all clearly marked with prices so there's no need for haggling as you'll get in many, many other stores. You can spend anything from $78 to $500 on a suit, and from $17 to $150 on a shirt - with everything in between. We arrived and were greeted by a lovely, smiling girl named Genia. She took us around the shop, pointing out the fabrics for shirts and suits, and then left me to make a decision.

I own two suits. One is an off-the-rack ill-fitting thing that I got from Burton around 12 years ago and have used for everything since: interviews, funerals, weddings, you name it. The other is a dinner suit with a 28" waist that I can just about squeeze into. I thought it prudent to buy two suits here - one for work stuff, and one for more casual events and whatnot.

I picked out a grey material for the work suit, and opted for a $200 blend of cashmere and wool. For a black suit, I went for a wool, cotton and polyester mix for $100. I also thought it worth getting some shirts - three Italian cotton shirts for $34 a piece seemed reasonable: one navy for evening wear, one white for all-purpose events, and one white with blue/pink stripes to go with the grey suit. Genia measured me up, and told me to come back for the first fitting the following day. They work fast in these places.

With that out of the way, it was over to Gilly to try and find something she liked. Genia freely admitted that women's clothes would be cheaper elsewhere, and probably of a similar quality. Unfortunately, the amount of clothing on offer around Hoi An short-circuited the shopping lobe in Gilly's brain, and she wandered around the town drooling. By the next day she would have adapted to the situation, but the first day was a write-off.

For dinner we went to the fantastic Miss Ly restaurant to try some of the specialty Hoi An dishes. The main treats are Cao Lau (noodles mixed with pork, pork crackling and lettuce in a sauce), White Rose (steamed dumplings containing a mix of prawn, chilli and lime, with crispy onions on top), and fried wontons with some sort of salsa with hot prawns on top. We ordered all three, and they were superb. In fact, we didn't manage to find a place that did all three dishes as well in the entire time we were in Hoi An.

Wontons:

White Rose:

Afterwards, with room to spare, we decided to take Julie and Lev's advice and head to Cargo. They had been talking up the desserts here, as had Tom and Holly, so we thought it would be rude not to. We weren't disappointed:

Mango pavlova:

Chocolate brownie cheesecake:

The next day we had lunch at the interestingly named "Lame Cafe" (fantastic rice pancakes, and a glass of draught beer is 3000 dong....or about 11p) and then wandered about town. Hoi An is a lovely little place, with lots of French influence apparent in all of the buildings, and a nice view over the river. It's like the word "quaint" was invented for this place.

I went for my first suit fitting, and was pretty impressed with their first attempt. The jacket for the grey suit was perfect, but the trousers were a little loose. With the black suit, the jacket was a little tight but the trousers were great. Genia got on the microphone and summoned up a tailor, who then went around me marking places on the clothes in chalk, before disappearing downstairs again. And with that, the first fitting was complete. This outfit of tailors is very professional.

Gilly plucked up the courage as we traversed the narrow streets to have a look at some dresses. She found a lovely purple dress in one tailor for $25 and got measured up; then she found a place that did both a great evening dress and a work suit for a total of $40. Find me a place in the UK that does tailor-made clothing at this price, and I will be a happy man.

Fittings over, we met up with Scott and Hannah for dinner at Faifoo and had a lovely meal in the evening. Of course, we had room for more Cargo desserts:

Chocolate mousse cake:

Chocolate Truffle cake:

On our third day we decided to explore the town a bit. Hoi An has a ticket scheme where you buy a ticket which gets you into 5 different places out of a possible 18 around the town, over the course of three days. On our first day we went to Tan Ky House (one of the oldest houses in Hoi An), the Handicraft Workshop (which hosted a traditional music and dance performance) and the Museum of History (a fairly limited selection of exhibits with some bad translations). Hoi An, we learned, used to be a prosperous port town, but the advent of other towns and cities along the coast doing better business coupled with a tendency for the river to flood each year meant that pretty much all major trade ceased to the town. The height of the floodwater was staggering - Tan Ky house had measurements of the water levels over the years:

The chalk mark just above Gilly's head was from a month ago(!) whilst the very top yellow label is the height reached in 1964. Unsurprisingly, when the floods are expected everyone moves all of their belongings to the top floors....

After a morning of sites, we went to Bale Well for lunch. They gave us a mountain of food: pork satay, rolled pork with rice paper, rice pancakes filled with shrimp, and spring rolls. All with an amazing sauce and about 3kg of salad to go with it. It was a tremendous meal, and we were thoroughly stuffed.


The afternoon saw us back in Yaly to check the adjustments on the suits. Everything fitted superbly. I felt a bit like James Bond. Getting back into my backpacker clothes (t-shirt and convertible trousers) was a little depressing. Still, we were cheered up by the news that a couple of our Canadian friends - Cayleigh and Patrick, whom we met over all-you-can-eat ice cream in Hanoi - were in town, so we arranged to meet up for dinner along with Scott and Hannah.

We crossed over the Japanese Covered Bridge and went gift shopping. Hoi An has a massive array of shops all selling a huge variety of presents. Chopsticks, lacquerware, fans, linens, coasters...pretty much anything you'd like to send home. The constant pleading of the owners (pretty much all female) to get you to go into their store can wear after a while, but you soon learn to zone it out. "You buy something!" and "Looking!" and "Come in here you!" seem to be the stock phrases most employ, as if the town was some sort of cartel who agreed to restrict formalities to three greetings with which they can entice the punters. Woe betide the maverick who branches out to learn a politer introduction.

Gilly picked up her dresses, and everything looked tip-top for both of us:

We headed to White Sail for dinner; I fancied something a little more Thai so opted for chicken with chilli and garlic, whilst everyone else tried the Hoi An dishes. None of us came away disappointed. Cayleigh and Patrick recommended a great bar to head to afterwards: the Sunshine Cafe, run by a lady who embodied the name of the establishment. She advised us that every hour was happy hour, so we got a few 12p beers before moving on to mojitos. We may have been the largest group of people to visit her little cafe for some time, bless her. After a few rounds of Uno, time had slipped by unnoticed and before we knew it the clock was hitting 11pm. The walk home was wet, but deathly quiet. The entire town shuts down at 11, and it was refreshing not to get offered a bicycle or some food as we trudged back to the hotel.

The following day we packed up all our gifts and new clothes along with some odds and ends we had picked up in our first two and a half months on the road, and went to the post office to ship them home. An hour later, and they were packaged in a box that was taped within an inch of its life and ready to head back to Blighty. My wonderful sister will be taking good care of the goodies until next October.

We had a couple of visits left on our tickets, so we went to a couple of Assembly Halls. Essentially, these are courtyards mixed with temples which are used for special events and are decorated in the style of the country who owned the hall. For instance, the Cantonese Assembly Hall had dragons and Chinese script all over.

We went back to Lame for lunch. We weren't as impressed with their wontons; I think we'd been spoiled by the quality elsewhere. After a few beers, we wandered around some of the galleries in town as well as the Museum of Folk which, like the other museum we'd been in, didn't really have much to offer. We fancied a change from Vietnamese food so went to Ganesh in the evening. It had the exact same menu as  Omar's in Hue, and we later found out that the company who runs them have a Ganesh or Omar's in pretty much every town in Vietnam. The food appears to be consistent though: it was as good, if not better than our meal in Hue. After a few games of cards in Cargo over dessert with Scott and Hannah, we walked back to the hotel in a downpour, the like of which I'd not seen since Bangkok. Luckily, the hotel supplied us with an umbrella in our room - a nice touch, which Gilly had sensibly thought to grab on the way out.

Tiramisu:

On our final day we met up with Patrick and Cayleigh in the morning and said goodbye, as they are heading over to Thailand for Christmas. They've kindly offered to host us when we hit Toronto though, so it wasn't a sad farewell.

We decided to go to Miss Ly and end on a positive note for lunch with the best Hoi An food in the town. A trip over the bridge to Cham Island was uneventful and there was none of the charm, ambience or indeed activity of the old town, so we headed back half an hour later. A final dessert in Cargo rounded off the afternoon, and we opted to share the awesome Gourmet Chocolate Plate:

A sleeper bus to Nha Trang awaited us at 6pm, for another 12 hour journey. Nha Trang is a beach town. The weather in Hoi An ranged from cloudy to bucketing down, possibly due to a tropical storm which may be sweeping the area, so we have no idea what the sky is going to look like when we stagger off the bus in the morning.

Day 59 - 61: Hué

The sleeper bus from Hanoi to Hué was the first we'd taken on our trip. It wasn't an unmitigated disaster, as we managed to get something like 5-6 hours sleep. It involved lying down on an adjustable seat stacked in three columns one behind the other and slanted so that your knees down were underneath the headrest of the seat in front. Ingenious, but not particularly good for moving around. Essentially, you are in a lying down position for over half a day, unless you wanted to bring your knees up to your chest. On top of this, the chairs are arranged bunkbed-style so there is an upper and lower row, and in true Vietnamese style the two aisles were filled with sacks of rice, live birds and for at least part of the journey, Vietnamese people.

At 6am though, a little brat of a girl decked out in denim, gold bracelet, gold necklace and gold earrings who couldn't have been older than 3 decided to scream every 15 seconds. A piercing, persistent shriek that served to wake up anyone unfortunate enough not to have bought earplugs. I'd wager that they'd have disintegrated even if they had, such was the sonic force generated by this spoiled shit. Her step-father was an English guy wearing similar attire to the kid, her mother was Vietnamese, and it was clear that neither of them had the ability to shut them up. An hour of this later, and I had concocted several ingenious methods of doing so myself, the best of which involved the child, a pane of glass and significant velocity.

We arrived, cranky and hating children even more than usual, 15 hours after setting off. It was raining. We hadn't experienced rain over any significant time period for at least a month. Hué soon made up for that; it rained consistently for the first two days, rained intermittently for the third day, and typically dried up on the morning of the fourth day when we got on a bus to Hoi An.

Hué itself, then. I imagine it's quite a quaint little city when you can walk around it without feeling cold and wet, but even with the drab weather we tried to make the most of it. On arrival we were taken by a free minibus to a hotel I had earmarked for potential by a guy who told us we'd be staying a luxury room with breakfast chucked in for $10. The photos looked stunning, and there was no obligation. Just as well really, as the room was $12, breakfast wasn't included, and the room looked nothing like the picture. The chap with the leaflet had obviously scarpered after dropping us off. We politely declined and walked across the road to Ngoc Binh Hotel where we were given a comfortable room for $8 (no breakfast, but that was fine).l When I say comfortable, I mean it was the softest mattress I have ever sat on. I imagine that if they'd made a bed out of marshmallow, this is what it would feel like. Bags dumped, we walked over to the Family House Restaurant opposite and had a hearty lunch (an excellent spicy fish casserole thing that is just the right side of "blow-your-head-off" hot) before setting off to find the main cultural hotspots. A Contemporary Art gallery we came across consisted of a house containing a number of vaguely-formed sculptures and little else. Across the road, we spent an hour or so at Ho Chi Minh Museum (apparently every city has one), and soon found ourselves faced with many of the same photos and excerpts from his speeches as in Hanoi. I have vowed not to go in another one until Ho Chi Minh city...if anywhere is going to enlighten us on this fellow, it's surely the city that's got his name. Right?

In the evening we went to Nina's Cafe, also on our street about 4 doors down. Somehow we'd managed to get a hotel in the road with the best restaurants in town, all serving up authentic local specialities. We tried Bang Khoai - a yellow pancake made from egg and rice flour, containing shrimp and pork - and some delicious pork which was wrapped around a spring onion for cooking, and then served with beansprouts, lettuce, cucumber and an amazing peanut sauce which you then roll up into pancakes using supplied rice papers. All of the food was fantastic.

The next day we checked out of Ngoc Binh in favour or Thai Binh 1 next door (the wi-fi in the former was playing up and we needed to get some photos uploaded) and braved the relentless drizzle and biting wind to head into the citadel and Imperial City. The citadel is the "old" city, whilst the Imperial City is a collection of buildings - a lot of them ruins - from the time of emperors in the early 19th to 20th centuries. It contains things like a theatre, palace, pavilions and ornate gates, and would make a lovely walk on a warm sunny day. We were not there on a warm sunny day. 4 hours later, dripping wet and freezing cold (where did the cold come from? I didn't order this on our trip until New Zealand!) we'd explored about as much as we wanted to, and were now ready to go back to our lovely hotel room. After getting dry, we went back to Nina's Cafe for an evening meal and saw a Geordie couple who had racked up 20 empty bottles of Huda Beer between them for the paltry sum of 200,000 dong (£6.60). That would barely get two pints in Bristol. The food was once again superb - we had more of the pork from the previous night and some speciality shrimp and fish spring rolls, then retired to the hotel.

On our last day in Hué, we decided to charter a motorbike taxi for the day. The Geordies had told us not to bother getting a tour - all of them took a dragon boat along the brown, murky Perfume river, with various stops at shops where the locals aggressively hawked their wares. With the weather as it was, we went for the "fun" option of getting on the back of a moped whilst a guy called Lop who didn't speak a word of English buzzed us about the various mausoleums in the area. This was my first time on a motorcycle, and despite my previous misgivings, it wasn't bad at all. Mopeds look fairly simple to ride, especially the automatics. We wandered around the three main mausoleums the tours spin you to but with the bonus of a) not being crowded with tourists getting in our shots and b) being able to take our time rather than the 15-minute whistle-stop visits you usually get. Despite our gesticulations, we ended up with one helmet between us which I gave to Gilly. I figured we'd be going slow enough with three people on a moped for it not to be too dangerous if I fell off.

We'd experienced the near misses from a distance in Hanoi. Actually being part of the "fun" and almost getting broadsided by bikes, cars and trucks whilst actually on a bike is completely different. Firstly, you have to have confidence in your driver. I did, completely. The guy was 60+, so had obviously been doing this for a while. Secondly, it helps not to stick out any extraneous body parts. On a number of occasions, Lop's tarpaulin raincover actually hit the moped handle of another driver coming in the opposite way. This is how it goes on a moped in Vietnam. People swerve all over, come close to hitting you, and at the last second turn away. After the third time of it happening, I became a bit blasé about it. It was just another ordinary "oh-my-God-we're-going-to-crash-oh-wait-we've-somehow-survived" scenario.

So we trundled around the entire day, hopping on and off at a total of three mausoleums and a pagoda. Lop had to ask for directions on a number of occasions to find these places. It was pretty obvious that when he'd yelled "motorbike!" at us, he wasn't expecting us to present him with an itinerary, and so proceeded to blag his way (via a helpful interpreter friend) from then on. The mausoleums are the "afterlife palaces" of the old Vietnamese emperors, and are sprawling complexes of buildings and grounds, littered with statues, ponds, temples, and so on. The three we went to were Minh Mang, Khai Dinh and Tu Duc. Khai Dinh was probably the most impressive, and had exceptional mosaic work in the walls inside, as well as a grandiose series of steps and platforms to climb to reach the main temple.

The other two were interesting as well, but not in such good condition.  Thien Mu Pagoda was last on the agenda, and was a working temple complete with chanting Buddhist monks, a Bonsai garden and, in a garage, the Austin car driven by the venerable monk who drove to the centre of Saigon and set himself on fire in protest at Catholic oppression of his faith. Sobering stuff.

Thankfully the weather in the afternoon diminished to cold, rather than cold and wet. We arrived back at our hotel at about 4:30pm, then went for dinner with Scott and Hannah - two Australians we took the Ha Long Bay tour with. We fancied something a bit more western, so ate at Omar Khayyam's Indian Restaurant which was possibly the best Indian meal we've had since leaving the UK. Still not a patch on home, but a damn good effort nonetheless.

We had explored Hué as much as we wanted to given the miserable weather, and were happy to head on south, so we booked a bus via the Family House Restaurant for the next morning to our third Vietnam destination - Hoi An.

Day 56 - 58: Ha Long Bay

The Kangaroo Cafe has had a rough ride on Trip Advisor. Part of it is probably not helped by the Cafe itself. The owner, Max - an Australian - has a typically blunt approach to pretty much everything regarding the marketing of his place. All around the cafe you'll find signs lauding the trip, and explaining exactly what he thinks of the multiple copycat tour groups in Hanoi, along with his forthright views on the quality of other tours, the duplicity of Lonely Planet, the quality of his meals, the size of the boat and the luxuriousness of the rooms, and so on. All written in Comic Sans MS, and complete with underlining and italics. His website is similar, and some of the responses to the Trip Advisor reviews cross the line from blunt to plain unprofessional. Swearing abounds. It's certainly a unique way of doing business. We'd never seen this level of self-aggrandisement in a company before, and it almost put us off booking with them.

However - and this is a big "however" - his company delivers on almost every single aspect.

We were already sold on the food at the cafe after trying one of their magnificent burgers. The tour was a different matter. $129 per person for a 3 day, 2 night tour wasn't the cheapest we found, but it certainly wasn't the most expensive. Rebecca and Craig paid the best part of $240 each for a stay on what was sold to them as a 4-star trip through a company called A-Class Opera, and were left disappointed and had to fight to get money back. We had contemplated doing a trip ourselves but after a chance encounter in Hanoi Backpackers with a Danish girl who had come back from a Kangaroo Cafe trip to Ha Long Bay (complete with pictures), we decided we'd book it.

On the day of the trip a fully air-conditioned bus picked us up just after 8am. It had the most legroom we've experienced on a bus in SE Asia so far and was a very comfortable ride. Our guide was Quan, a genial gent who was more than happy for us to ask questions and actively sought our opinion of every aspect of the tour - more on that later.

So, the boat itself.

Getting onto the White Dolphin, we were greeted with a dining room laid out like an upmarket restaurant, all cloth napkins, crisp tablecloths, and wine glasses along with a well-stocked bar. We had a welcome drink of orange juice, and were handed our room key.

The room far, far exceeded our expectations. A lovely double bed with bedside tables on either side, one of which had an antique telephone for some reason. A balcony that opened out onto the water (not just a window). A separate sofa. A fridge. A bathroom containing toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, shower gel, combs, and - to Gilly's delight - a hairdryer. On top of this, a rain shower in a separate cubicle. It's as close to a 4-star experience as you're likely to get on a boat.

Back to the dining room then, for our first meal. This was the thing I was most wary about; most of the negative reviews on Trip Advisor complained that the food was greasy and bland. Our lunch that day consisted of a starter of pumpkin soup with a plate of salad, followed by freshly cooked cockles, then crab meat in the shell mixed with vegetables, accompanied by rice and cooked vegetables, then what I can only describe as a squid pakora, and ending with dragon fruit. The whole thing was outstanding, pretty healthy, and exceptionally tasty.

Like any tour you go on from Hanoi, you have to pay for drinks on board and will also pay if you bring drinks on yourself (water is excluded from this latter rule). The prices aren't too bad but we smuggled on a box of wine we got from the supermarket, with the intention of sharing on the down low with our fellow shipmates. This turned out to be an excellent plan.

After lunch we took a trip with one of the many guides on the boat to what he described as "The Surprising Cave" (Thien Cung). This was a bit of an understatement. The cave, a hollowed out limestone shell with masses of natural rock formations artfully uplit with neon coloured lights, was staggeringly beautiful. We saw a rock that had formed into the shape of a tortoise, stalactite and stalagmite formations, and individual grottoes and karsts which were incredible. Ha Long Bay is a World Heritage site, and is trying to become known as one of the 7 wonders of the modern world. Judging by the cave, it's a realistic prospect.

The weather on the trip was pretty grey - it drizzled for almost all of the first day, and Quan suggested postponing kayaking to the following day in the hopes of getting better weather. We had checked the forecasts beforehand, so this wasn't unexpected - Ha Long Bay was still beautiful in the mist, so I can only imagine it is spectacular on a clear, sunny day. We anchored at about 5pm and then had the chance to jump off the boat into the water from various heights, which was great fun. The water wasn't too cold once you were submerged. Gilly opted against it, but Tom, Holly and I braved the waters:

Dinner consisted of salad, french fries, fried chicken, a whole cooked fish, rice, spring rolls and cabbage. Dessert was watermelon, and chocolate marshmallow cakes. All good.

One negative - the boat's staff weren't the friendliest. The one young guy was fantastic, and couldn't do enough for us, but the rest of them sat in the dining/lounge area on the comfortable seats, smoking and playing chess, and were fairly surly when we wanted to do some swimming in the evening. After one of the passengers spoke to Quan about it, he immediately told them to stop smoking and they did so. However, they still spent the day lounging in the chairs; it was pretty cold outside and we'd have liked to sit and socialise, but in the end had to pile around the dining room table to do so. Quan was excellent - friendly, sociable and gave some very interesting information on the places we visited and also Vietnam. For example, Vietnamese people have to pay 100% tax on imported items - sometimes 150% (such as for cars). So a $20,000 Toyota will set them back an insane $50,000. Corruption on the part of the government, or a way of promoting local manufacturing? Quan believes it is almost certainly the former.

We were due to do some kayaking in the afternoon, but it was pouring with rain and Quan asked if we wanted to postpone it until tomorrow at Monkey Island. What I didn't realise was that the chance to kayak into caves was only something we could do on the first day. This wasn't explained to us, until the next day when the option to do this was no longer available. This was a little disappointing - I got the feeling the boat staff weren't keen on going out in the rain to sort the kayaks out, so we were encouraged to postpone it.

We had a very comfortable night's sleep but the showers in the morning started off freezing, and moved up to lukewarm. It was too late to tell the staff but they probably would have sorted it out if we'd asked. Breakfast was omelette, toast with jam and butter, baguette, tea and coffee. Quan said that we could have different types of egg if we wanted (fried, scrambled, etc). Omelette suited me fine and it all tasted good.

We took a bus ride and a short boat in the pouring rain across to Thien Long (dragon cave) which was less spectacular but more "natural", and still great to explore. Apparently only Kangaroo Cafe tours go to this cave out of all of the tour groups; we saw one other couple, but I think they chartered their own boat and guide. There was a rock that was allegedly in the shape of a Buddha but our guide told us, tongue firmly planted in cheek, that a level of imagination was necessary.

Afterwards, we took the boat to Cat Ba Island and had a fantastic lunch at Green Mango. The blurb in Kangaroo Cafe claims it is the best restaurant on the island. I can believe that, as the food was excellent (and looking at the price list, it's likely the most expensive on Cat Ba to boot). We had plates of food brought out consecutively to share: papaya salad; Tom Yum soup; fried calamari and prawns; sweet and sour fish; BBQ chicken wings with rice; toasted tuna sandwiches with fries; a plate of fruit to finish. Again, all of it was excellent and filling.

In the afternoon we took the boat to Monkey Island. Interesting place - the wild monkeys there are used to humans, but are actually vicious little animals. They are used to humans giving them food, and will actively try and get into any bags you've brought along, and will even attack you if you don't give them food. This happened to Hannah, an Australian girl in our group; a man further down the beach had been feeding them, and they came over to her - she had no food, and couldn't run away (you're advised not to as they see that as a threat), and one of the larger monkeys came up and bit her leg. She was taken by boat immediately to the pharmacy to get rabies shots and was fine, but I would advise not getting too close to the monkeys if you can help it. Still, here's some pictured of the little bastards looking fairly cute:

We did some kayaking for an hour from the island to one of the beaches nearby. Great fun, the water wasn't too cold, and it had stopped raining. To be honest, it was worth doing to ensure we didn't get attacked by our simian "friends".

We got to the hotel on Cat Ba island at about 5:30pm, and the evening was ours to do what we wanted with. The hotel - Ngoc Lan Anh - was described as one of the better hotels on the island by Kangaroo Cafe. It was excellent. We had a double room which was HUGE and incorporated all mod cons: two double beds, table and chairs, massive bathroom with all the extras, a TV, hairdryer, wi-fi, the works. It had a great concave window looking out onto one of the Cat Ba cliffs, and all in all we were very impressed. We had some wine with Tom and Holly, taught them how to play Uno, listened to some Christmas tunes, then went out for some food. We we wandered around and went to a restaurant next to Bamboo cafe. I had fried crab (still in the shell) and steamed rice. We went back to our hotel, which had a karaoke room(!) and after the manager - a crazy and hilarious man named Zum - literally poured some rice whisky down our throats from a pitcher, we were in the mood for some singing. I think we were the only people in the hotel, which may have been a blessing given our efforts. Retiring to bed at 12:30am, we felt a little guilty as one of the hotel girls had stayed up as well, to ensure we had drinks, etc.

She was there at breakfast at 8am the next day serving us with a cracking selection of food - there are 7 options to choose from, ranging from pancakes, to omelettes, to Vietnamese breakfast staples, with bananas and tea or coffee. After checking out, we took a bus and then a boat to Ha Long City for lunch. After the Green Mango, the hotel we stopped at for lunch was disappointing. It was another set menu consisting of salad, chicken and potato casserole, fried fish in spicy sauce, rice, freshly cooked prawns, and chips. Sounds great, and tasted great, but we had one plate of each of the above to share between six people. There was simply not enough food. The meal ended with 8 segments of orange and I don't think I'd be alone in saying that 1.33 segments of orange does not class as dessert. If they had cooked a plate of each dish for four people, it would have been much better. As it was, by the time we left the restaurant and got the bus back to Hanoi, I was still hungry.

Overall then, was it worth doing the tour? Absolutely yes.

It's not perfect, but after seeing some of the cattle class tours being offered by the other operators, it was luxury by comparison and very reasonably priced. The maximum number of people is 16 on a 3-day tour, 14 on a 2-day. Other boats have large groups of people, sometimes from 3 different companies, all crowded on. There were 12 in our group, and we formed a great bond and made some fantastic new friends, despite the awful weather for most of the trip. It's a sign of a good tour that even rain can't dampen spirits. Here's all of us enjoying the rain at the end of the trip:

I'd love to see more of Ha Long Bay in the dry season, I can imagine it would be exceptionally beautiful. However, even with the rain the cliffs had an ethereal quality about them as they appeared through the mist:

We'll be back again, one day.

Day 54 - 55: Puppets, Singers and Fine Arts

On Sunday we went to the Fine Art Museum in the morning. I was hoping for something more; three floors of ceramics, lacquer paintings and silk paintings, whilst undeniably well crafted, didn't do much for me. There was one gallery of oil paintings which weren't bad, but other than that I much preferred the slew of mini galleries dotted around the city.

After lunch at a small cafe we went to the water puppet theatre. It was an enjoyable 50 minutes of puppet wizardry, with puppets mixing water, fire and smoke to make an accessible spectacle, accompanied by a 9-piece orchestra. Kids would definitely love it, whilst adults no doubt marvel at the ingenuity of the stage and performers.

We found a cracking bakery called Fresh Garden which sold fantastic filled rolls, croissants, cakes and more, and bought a few things to eat before the Ca Tru performance. We met up with Tom and Holly for a couple of drinks beforehand, and went to Hanoi Backpackers to track down someone who had been on one of the Halong Bay tours who Tom knew. We didn't find him, but by sheer serendipity bumped into a Danish girl who had been on a Kangaroo Cafe tour, had loved it, and had got the pictures to show us. It looked like a lot of the reviews on Trip Advisor were indeed nonsense, and armed with this information we proceeded to head to Kangaroo Cafe's second outlet to buy the 3-day, 2-night tour for Tuesday.

With this done, we met Lan at the Ca Tru theatre and took our seats. The musical style was unlike anything I've ever heard. There is a singer (usually female although during one of the switchovers a man took the lead) who plays a wooden percussion block - for want of a better word - with two sticks in one hand, and one in the other. She sings from her belly with very little mouth movement and it is surprising how powerful her voice got. She is accompanied by someone on a three-string lute, one of the longest instruments you'll find, and someone playing a small drum rather erratically. The lyrics are usually traditional folk songs describing Vietnamese life, and the pace is quite slow. When the female singer - who is apparently well renowned in Vietnam for her ability - switched with one of the men, the rhythm got a bit jauntier. If a picture tells a thousand words, a video should cover a few million:



During an intermission we were given information on the instruments used and then had the opportunity to try and play one of them. I had a bash at the drum, excuse the pun, and found that it was actually pretty difficult to play. You'd think hitting a bit of stretched skin on some wood with a single stick to get one of two possible notes out of it would be fairly simple. This is not the case - for me, anyway.

We were introduced to the main singer afterwards who translated through Lan, and asked if we enjoyed the performance. Whilst not something I would rush out and buy a CD of, I could truthfully answer yes, it was actually a very enjoyable hour and a half.

Feeling peckish, we grabbed a couple of nibbles and drinks from Gecko before retiring for the night.

The next day we decided to try and find Gilly some sunglasses and t-shirts. We half succeeded. Luong Van Can is known as "sunglasses street". This follows an odd theme in Hanoi: all of the shops appear to compete with each other on the same street. All of the silk shops are next to each other. As are the sunglasses shops, the shoe shops, the clothes shops, the flower shops, the Christmas decoration shops, the home furniture shops, and so on. If you can find a niche market, odds are there will be 3 or 4 shops in a row selling that product. On our way to sunglasses street we saw a road with 4 consecutive shops selling store mannequins. I'm not joking. Anyway, after eight identical sunglasses stores, Gilly got into the haggling game when she finally found a pair she liked. I liked the owners too - they thought we were students, and said I didn't look a day over 25. Result all round.

T-shirts were a different matter. Vietnamese women's sizes appear to range from XS (our version of XXXS) to L (our version of S). Gilly tried a medium which didn't fit, and then a large...which was still too small. Men's sizes seem to be different. For no reason other than I liked the colour, I tried on a small t-shirt and found it fit perfectly. So I bought it. Gilly's face was understandably a picture.

A trip to Ha Loa prison was on the cards for the morning as well, we stumbled on it quite by accident - everything we'd read said it was closed on Mondays, but this wasn't the case. An interesting self-guided tour around it ensued; it was the place they kept American pilots that were shot down during the Vietnam War (or American War as it's known here). It was known sarcastically as the Hanoi Hilton Hotel by the POWs and guests included one John McCain, Republican contender for the 2008 US Presidency. His flight jumpsuit is on display amongst much paraphenalia and Vietnamese propaganda about how well US prisoners were treated. Eavesdropping on an organised tour, one Vietnamese tour guide debunked this quite bluntly: he said prisoners were tortured for information. Not particularly shocking news, but his matter-of-factness was a refreshing change after all of the rose-tinted info we'd been given in previous museums.

We tried and failed to identify the train services to Hue from the main train station (we are going to Hue immediately after returning from our tour), so went across the road and grabbed lunch at a place called The Deli. I think it was a catering company but had a cafe upstairs, and the freshly made curried chicklen baguettes we had were superb.

The rest of the afternoon was spent pottering about the city. We bought water and a box of wine for the tour the next day (drinks are not included and have to be bought on the boat), had dinner at a restaurant called Aubergine, tried unsuccessfully to track down Jazz Club Minh (the location mentioned in the guidebook appears to have closed down but the website is still active, so maybe it's moved), then went back to the hotel ready for a 6:30 alarm the next day to begin our Halong Bay tour.