day 242, Ha Long City to Cat Ba island

We forced ourselves to get up early in order to achieve what we needed to do, as the fallback plan is to spend another night in Ha Long City and there’s fuck all here. We rode to the tourist wharf to see about getting a ferry to Cat Ba Island with our bikes, parking up we get harassed by touts selling their boat tours, then the lady behind the official desk with a uniform doesn’t tell us what we need to know and is in cahorts with one of the touts. After leaving there we go and speak to a couple of travel agents, we speak to one lovely lady who once she understands what we want tells us she can’t arrange it but how we go about doing it. We have to ride to another place to catch a ferry to the island. It’s a 15 minute drive and once there are told the ferry leaves at 3, though we aren’t allowed motorbikes on the ferry, we then watch the ferry come in and numerous people drive off on bikes and cars… We check with someone else at another place who is non-plussed by this, so we adapt the attitude of fuck it, we’ll just turn up and see. Back to the hotel and pick up our bikes and have three hours to kill, so we go to ride over the huge suspension bridge which is damn cool, sit on the other side of the bridge by the waterfront for a bit. I was in a bit of a down mood during the day, a bit frustrated with people not telling the truth and making things harder then they should be, plus it’s still fucking freezing, my feet always seem to be cold, I’m sat writing this in socks and my thick jumper wrapped round them under a duvet and they are still cold, pissing me off a treat,  and I haven’t seen the sun since I arrived in Vietnam. The hours to kill wasn’t helping, though we filled up with petrol and had a coffee, loaded our bags onto our bikes and drove to the ferry port, where we bought tickets from the woman who said we couldn’t take bikes on the ferry sell us a ticket for our bikes. We had a 45 minute wait so sat on the edge of the waterfront and a group of birds of prey, not sure what exactly they were, were amazing, we counted ten in total and they were hunting for fish and were simply majestic. That cheered me up nicely. We then boarded the ferry and went through Ha Long Bay which has just been voted one of the new ‘seven wonders of the world’, you know what it looks like, huge karsts that are awesome. After an hour we arrive and the drive through Cat Ba is stunning, we find a hotel real easy and sit down, I’m in a lot happier mood as it feels like the start of an adventure, I’ve been stuck in Hanoi for a while and want to get going, and now it finally feels like I am. We went for dinner after chilling out and watching Alvin and the Chipmunks (the squekquel, I think), had a tiramisu ice cream and going to bed.