Halong Bay and beyond: Adventures with Thuy

Finding a Halong Bay cruise is HARD. First, there are about a million companies you could go through. Some of them are real, some of them are fake. When you read reviews for Halong Bay cruises, you find things like this:
- "mainly older people and couples"
- "party boat, booze cruise"
- "cheap, dirty, bad service"
- "worth the money, beautiful, mostly old people"

Being a solo traveler who didn't want a booze cruise, I had to do some extra research. I found a company on a reddit forum called Ocean Tours that seemed perfect. I sent them an email and signed up. 2 nights, 3 days for $135 including accommodation, food, transport, basically everything but drinks. It was for people in their 20s and sailed around the bay in a different way than the rest of the cruises. Perfect. When I got to Hanoi, I went to the office and made it official.

Before I start talking about the cruise, I need to talk about Thuy (pronounced "twee"). Thuy was our tour guide for the cruise. She is a firecracker. She is a tiny itty bitty 23-year-old Vietnamese girl. She has endless amounts of energy. We were
relatively convinced that she doesn't sleep--she just plugs herself into a wall and charges. She has a hard time pronouncing her s's, so you have to really pay attention to what she's saying. When she speaks Vietnamese when she's excited, she sounds like a video fast-forwarding. She is the happiest person and is so much fun. We LOVED Thuy.

At 7 am, I went to the Ocean Tours office in Hanoi where we got on a bus, picked up everyone else, and started the journey to Halong Bay. The Canadians were late. Typical. Thuy got everyone's attention ("Excue meeee!) to tell us about the itinerary. She talked for a long time and then asked if we had "any que-ton." We didn't, since none of us understood a word of it. I talked to the Canadians and the other American on the way to the ferry. When we got to the port 2.5 hours later, we got on the speed boat. It was the strangest boat I've been on. We all sat in the cabin, which was set up like an airplane with three seats on each side of a narrow aisle down the middle. We were level with the water. There was no leg room because Vietnam. We were on that boat for about 40 minutes before we got dropped off at our cruising boat. We dropped our stuff in the cabin downstairs, listened to Thuy explain...something, and then laid out upstairs to get some sun. It was chilly. Not so good for tanning on the top deck of the boat. We started our cruise near the southwest corner of Cat Ba island and spent the day cruising around the long way to the south where the town was. From where we started, Cat Ba looked like Jurassic Park. Shortly after we started cruising, we had lunch: chicken, fish, fries, veggies, and rice. We entered the bay as we finished lunch.

Halong Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is comprised of almost 2000 limestone islands. I don't know much more than that--look it up. While we cruised around the group of about 20 of us split up into the front deck of the boat and the back deck. Team Frontdeck was me, Dan (American), Matt and Kelly (Canadian), and Becky and Jack (English). Kelly brought out his speakers and we had some great music as we cruised around. It was impossible to put the camera down for even a second. It was blue skies the whole day, and the islands were unbelievable. On the east side of Cat Ba, we went for a kayak. We cruised into some caves (Dan and I accidentally beached ourselves on a rock in a dark cave for a bit) and then continued to paddle around. There was another group there, and we ran into Sylvan and Paulina in another kayak! Eventually we all decided to race, which consisted of America vs English vs Canada vs Germany paddling really fast in generally the same direction until we got tired. Then we tried to bump into each other for a while. All in all, it was a great hour of kayaking.

Back on the boat for more cruising. A little while later, we ended up in a swimmable area, so a bunch of us jumped off the boat. The water was way warmer than the air, and it was a really fun time. When we got back on, we changed into dry clothes and cruised to Cat Ong island, arriving just as the sun was setting.

Cat Ong was our own private island. We stayed in bungalows on the beach. There was one bar/restaurant where we hung out all night. After getting settled into the bungalows, we went to the bar to play ping pong and drinking games (led by the Canadians). Dinner was barbecue, oysters, and chicken with rice. Around 9:30, I decided to go sit out on the beach for a while and then went to bed. Everyone else came in between midnight and 3 am.

The next morning, we were woken up by Thuy and trudged over to breakfast. I felt bad about disappearing the night before, so rather than sleep in (because I was doing a second night), I went to breakfast at 7:30 with everyone else. Breakfast was fried bananas, pancakes, and chocolate syrup. So good. After breakfast, I said goodbye to everyone and went back to bed to finish reading "The Stand" by Stephen King. I walked back to the bar area to find Dan and Thuy playing ping pong. I asked if we could go for a hike. Thuy said yes, and gathered up a few people. Apparently when Thuy says 'hike', she means 'bushwhack and climb through the jungle.' It was definitely one of the more...interesting hikes. The first part was easy enough, albeit overgrown. Thuy fixed that by ripping plants out of the way. We ended up on some cliffs that we scrambled down and hung out at for a while. Then it was time to go to the top of the island. This required a lot of climbing over sharp rocks and trying not to slide down the hill. The view from the top was 360 degrees and beautiful. We scrambled back down and spent the rest of the morning on the beach finding shells and sea glass and generally relaxing. We went up for lunch at 11:30, and at 1:00 we got on tiny boats that took us to Cat Ba island. The boats had engines that made the entire boat vibrate the whole time. it was a weird feeling when it finally stopped.

We got off the boat and went for egg coffee, which is when they whip an egg and add sugar and put it on top of your coffee. The place Thuy likes was closed, but somehow she got them to open for her (we'd all be terrified to anger Thuy). The egg coffee was sweet and delicious. The 10 of us who were left piled into a van and drove to Cat Ba National Park. On the way, Thuy tried to make sleeping arrangements for the boat. She kept saying "we can make triple room for you if you want," but 'triple' came out sounding like 'cheaper,' which confused all of us because we had assumed accommodation was included. It was. She was saying 'triple.' What it came down to was this: the 3 dutch girls wanted to share a triple. The Dutch couple shared a room. Two Argentinian girls shared a room. This left me, Dan, and an Argentinian guy. I pulled the girl card and got my own room while the two guys shared.

We arrived at the park and walked up stairs for about 45 minutes. At the top was a spectacular view. Dramatic green peaks dotting the landscape rose and fell sharply but symmetrically. We stayed up there for a long time before heading back down when we heard Thuy shouting for us. We drove to a water taxi, which took us to our second boat where we'd be spending the night. We had a delicious dinner and hung out on the deck until it grew dark. I slept in my own private room for the first time since Taiwan.

I woke up the next morning to a beautiful view of Halong Bay. After breakfast, I taught everyone how to play Spoons, and we had some really intense games while Thuy grabbed another group from Cat Ba Town to meet us on the boat. We sat on the top deck and cruised back through Halong Bay to Halong City. There was one guy in the second group of unknown origin (Vietnamese maybe?). I heard from everyone else that he had made every girl uncomfortable at some point in their trip, so I steered clear. On the bus ride from Halong City to Hanoi, he kept getting up and giving Thuy back rubs or asking her questions but touching her at the same time. She was very visibly uncomfortable, so I ended up yelling at him. "She doesn't like it. Stop touching her." He said, "It's just fun." I said, "Maybe fun for you, not for her." He didn't get up again, but he did give her a very weird hug when he got off the bus.

The other thing that happened on the bus ride home was Thuy invited me and Dan to go home with her to her village. Dan couldn't because he was going to Sapa that night, but I immediately accepted the invitation.

When I got dropped off in Hanoi, I went to my hostel, switched some clothes, and immediately went back to the office where Thuy was waiting for me. She led me through the streets of Hanoi to a public bus where I was the only white person (a common theme for the next couple days). We got off that bus and switched to another much more crowded bus. When we got off that bus we sort of flagged down a mini-bus that would take us near her village. The seats were Vietnam-sized, so I squished myself in and tried to doze for the 2 1/2 hour journey. We got out at a small village, called a cab, and got to Thuy's house.

Thuy's house is modest and wonderful. You take off your shoes to enter the house and put on sandals provided. The front door is open like a shop. Basically there's a whole wall that isn't there, but it closes with huge shutters at night. The living room is spacious and filled only with a sofa, two chairs, a table, and a tv. There is constantly tea being poured at the table. Down the hallway there are two bedrooms taken up entirely by the beds and separated from the house by curtains (reminiscent of Jarry's house in The Gambia). Further down, you slip your sandals off and put on new sandals to go into the kitchen. The kitchen is two small counters and two burners, but the room itself is very big. Outside there are chickens, a squatty potty with no door, and a washroom with a sink, a faucet, and some tubs to wash clothes in.

Thuy's family spoke no English. When I walked in, they offered me tea, which I drank. Random people of various relations came over to nod at me. Thuy's mom had killed a chicken for us, so we put the mat out in the living room and ate chicken, rice, and pumpkin. We also took lots of shots of a honey liquor and a lotus liquor. There was a man of unknown relation (aunt's friend?) who took a selfie with me. So normal. We ate every part of the chicken and spit out the bones and had a wonderful time. Thuy's grandmother joined us partway through. She is 85 years old and the only part of her that isn't wrinkled is the tip of her nose. Her teeth are stained black and red from constantly chewing on betel nuts. She hunches over and for the first night I thought she only had one eye, but later I realized she just keeps it closed a lot. The next morning, I saw her chopping wood across the street. Killing it!

After dinner, we got on the back of Thuy's motorbike (she had not had any of the liquor) and went to get coffee with her friends. There was one friend who spoke a little English and was a tour guide/bartender/hairdresser? Mostly while Thuy caught up with her friends I tried to make sense of an Indian soap opera that was dubbed in Vietnamese. Something about a lover scorned at the altar who returned and then the girl was in the hospital and may have been pregnant and then the scorned guy came back all bedraggled and who knows. Anyway, we went to bed around 11.

The next morning I woke up to the sounds of all the animals. Ducks, chickens, roosters, dogs, etc. Breakfast was pho, and then Thuy and I went to the market to buy things for lunch. When we got there, I was a celebrity. First, I had to duck under everything because all the stands were so low to accommodate the Vietnamese people who were all about half my height. Women kept asking Thuy about me and pointing at me, and they kept coming over to stand next to me to compare themselves. We bought some pork at a stand where there was just a cut up pig. Pig face, ears, slabs of pork, legs, jar of blood, bowl of guts. We took a slab of pork and some guts. Then we went to Thuy's other grandmother's house who also has betel nut stained teeth and asked me if I was married (when Vietnamese people stick up their index fingers and hit them together, it means "are you married?"). That was the question of the village while I was there. After drinking tea and eating popcorn with her, we went back to Thuy's house and had pork for lunch. I took a nap after lunch, and then Thuy put me on the bus to go back to Hanoi. While waiting for the bus, a woman came up and tried to marry me to her son. Rather than take two public buses with no labels by myself to get back, Thuy had said something about her brother picking me up.

About halfway through the bus ride, someone handed me a phone. Thuy was on the other line. She said that when the bus stopped, I should stay on it, and her brother would come get me. Thankfully, that happened, and I rode on his motorbike to get back to my hostel.