Hanoi, Halong Bay and Tet New Year – Part Two

Note: This is the second part of a com­plete three part art­icle that com­pletes our time in Viet­nam. We con­tinue with our trip into Halong Bay

The trip cost us $85, and we were lucky, oth­ers on our boat later told us what they had paid any­thing from $80 to $160 each for exactly the same experience.

The bus arrived at the dock’s edge (hav­ing vis­ited the ubi­quit­ous tourist-shucking-shop on the way) and we joined the scrum wait­ing for their boats. It was there that I star­ted to come up with a theory:

What appears to hap­pen, to my scep­tical mind, is that the tour guide from the hotel is actu­ally an agent from one of these travel cafes. He arrives with bus­load of suck­ers, all who have been sold “lux­ury” cruises and gen­er­ally up-sold as much as pos­sible, and then goes into the dock office and passes you off into that sys­tem for a commission.

Then he bug­gers off.

Now you are in another sys­tem, which has bought you all at the same price. This is why pay­ing more makes no dif­fer­ence to the cli­ent. To the agent, pay­ing more goes straight into his pocket. So now, you are randomly’ishly assigned a boat by block and shuffled aboard. The boat crew have paid the office a small amount for mem­ber­ship of the boat club and they then earn all their money, bey­ond a cut of the price, in the reselling of extras. This explains why a beer is £4 and they hate you bring­ing your own water.

How­ever, that is just a the­ory and frankly like most we simply went along with it like sheep. After ten minutes our boat was ready. It didn’t look too bad; a little fake in that extra effort had been made to make it look ori­ental, with wood pan­els and dragon­heads, etc. Really, it was just a big square-bottomed cruiser.

We said hello to our fel­low pas­sen­gers and settled into our room. This was in the second deck above the main kit­chen, which itself was above the engine. The qual­ity of the room was not too bad for two days at sea and I am sure that in the sum­mer a lot of fun is to be had in sun­bathing on the decks. This was not sum­mer, but then we are Brit­ish and are more than used to that. Cesca showed con­cern about the noise, but I figured that we would be stopped dur­ing the night.

Of course, the boat and the rooms had only passing resemb­lance to the pic­tures in the brochures.

The boat made its way out of the bay, jost­ling with the abso­lute armada of other semi-identical boats all set­ting off at the same time. We piled onto the top deck and con­sidered the scrum; a ver­it­able traffic jam of boats hit­ting each other and men shout­ing while wield­ing barge poles.

All the boats had people on the top deck (effect­ively the roof) by now and every­one was a little sheep­ishly star­ing at each other’s trans­port to see who’s was the best. I think that ours was average.

I was film­ing this amaz­ing sight on my cam­corder when it sud­denly went pop and broke. Yep, I went off-line with my film­ing from this moment. This was the start of a big hassle and I did not get a work­ing video cam­era up and run­ning until half way through India, two months away!

Any­way, we chugged across to the fam­ous lime­stone karsts peaks of Halong. They were large, strange, and pop­ping out of the water to great heights. Over all there are more than 775 dot­ted around only 334km.

These amaz­ing ancient struc­tures have fea­tured in many nov­els and films and it is not hard to see why, as they are unique. At least that is what they tell you on the trip. They remind me of fjords that have half col­lapsed into the sea. We passed by ump­teen small struc­tures as the sea mist swirled around them. The con­sensus on board was that they were well worth seeing

What I per­son­ally enjoyed more, strange old me, was the com­munit­ies that live on the water, lit­er­ally on the water, at the bases of the islands. Float­ing little vil­lages and boats fer­ry­ing loc­als to a fro were very inter­est­ing. What would liv­ing in such a place be like? I wondered to myself. How would you get to work or to school?

The boat made its way fur­ther amongst the islands, roughly in a line with all the oth­ers. Then we came to the first stop; the Sung Sot Caves, or in Eng­lish, “The Caves of Sur­prises!” I have been in caves all over the world, from Asia, to Amer­ica to Aus­tralasia and of course, in the UK, but here was a cave sys­tem of mag­ni­fi­cent proportions.

The Viet­namese know this and have designed a walk through the cave sys­tem that would be in Dis­ney World if it were not so real. Well lit and stun­ning in pro­por­tion we went down to the caves in groups. The group leader tried vali­antly to tell us about what we were see­ing, albeit an offi­cial ver­sion, but I could not under­stand a word of what he was talk­ing about so I star­ted listen­ing to the next group. Then I noticed my Amer­ican chums from Soth­ern Vietnam.

After exchan­ging hel­los and a quick update on our jour­ney through the county, Cesca and I joined in with them and we all walked around together. The girl, and I hon­estly can­not remem­ber her name — sorry, was about to fin­ish her 6 month trip and head back home.

This was the first time that I had come across a now very famil­iar syn­drome. When people start trav­el­ling they expect some­thing to hap­pen. They expect to change, get reli­gion, or become one with nature. To find them­selves changed inside, with the flash­ing of epi­phany and moment­ous re-understandings of space­time. It is not their fault; this is how trav­el­ling is sold to people; its image. Watch­ing films like, The Beach or The Motor­cycle Diar­ies, sug­gests that you can lose your­self and find your­self on your travels. Per­haps even become a fam­ous revolu­tion­ary leader!

The truth is not so seductive.

This is 2009 and it is quite pos­sible, even on a budget, to travel for months and never be out of your com­fort zone, to never be reached inside, even by your­self. This is par­tially due to what is called, “The back­pack­ers bubble”. It is really hard to hon­estly break out of this bubble. This leads to a quite strong feel­ing of frus­tra­tion with hav­ing missed some­thing. People tend to become unchar­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally philo­soph­ical at these times, they tend to want to talk about, “what they have learned and what it all means.”

She talked and I listened.

Since then, I have come across this mind-set many times and I have talked many people through it, lent an ear and spoken a little on the sub­ject. In fact, I have been think­ing about it deeply and I am going to write a lot more than is appro­pri­ate here. Suf­fice to say, this girl was ever so slightly dis­ap­poin­ted with her trip and needed to talk about it.

I am glad that she chose me for that brief moment for I was able to tell her this: “When you get home, when you find your old life envel­ope you like a warm bath, you will feel a tinge of guilt. Guilt that you did not become Che Guevara or a Zen Buddhist Mas­ter. You may also feel shame. Shame that there is not a book going to be writ­ten about your exper­i­ences. You want your life to have a mean­ing; you are told that it is spe­cial. Of course, life itself is spe­cial, but the mean­ing of an individual’s life is not found at the end of jour­neys. Mean­ing is found by liv­ing and breath­ing. Life is not a pil­grim­age with a reward at the end. Life is a dance, and one that you only get to dance once. Cher­ish what you have done, not what you missed. Don’t look back, don’t look for­wards. Con­cen­trate on now. Live in the now and let the past rest and future be. Then your life will not lack for meaning.

Any­way, out of the caves, we returned to the boat and it took us to a float­ing vil­lage. This vil­lage had some very dodgy canoes, which we all jumped in and rowed ourselves around and through a cave sys­tem. This was pretty cool, but let down by the very poor equip­ment and the short time given to this part of the jour­ney. I got the sense of boxes being ticked by the tour guides.

Then we were dropped off at an island to walk to the top of a karst moun­tain. It was great fun, if a little steep. At the top, we watched the night­fall and the lights come on all around.

That night we came down for din­ner and sat with a nice Eng­lish couple we had been chat­ting to and get­ting on well with.

Then the staff came up and dir­ec­ted us to move to sit with a dif­fer­ent group.

“Why?” I asked

“You have dif­fer­ent meal.”

“But we don’t mind, neither do our friends here,” cue agree­ment from our new com­rades, “we want to sit here.”

“Move that table now,” he said point­ing to the table next to us.

“Does it really matter?”

“Now!”

This con­ver­sa­tion was then repeated with the next table and so on until the entire boat was being rearranged because no-one was seated “where they should be”  Every­one had to get up, move a few feet and back sit down. People were all a little miffed to say the least and some loud protests fell on deaf ears.

After all that, the only dif­fer­ence in the meal was the starter: crab.

The Viet­namese insist­ence in this regard, and their total bemuse­ment regard­ing our reti­cence, was the first time I had come across a pecu­liar Asian phe­nomenon. It does not hap­pen very often, but mores and social norms are nat­ur­ally dif­fer­ent over here. Not that they are in any way wrong, just dif­fer­ent and when West­ern and East­ern feel­ings clash it often res­ults in a com­plete lack of under­stand­ing. Our hosts simply stood bemused at everyone’s prob­lem with mov­ing, shocked (prob­ably) at the (appar­ent) rude­ness. For the West­ern­ers, on the other hand, who had all been brought up that the “cus­tomer is always right”, rules in res­taur­ants are really only guidelines; often broken as a way of mak­ing one feel spe­cial. To us the staff were being amaz­ingly fussy and rude.

Who hasn’t been asked to fol­low a rule by a server of some type and then had them make an excep­tion, “just for you sir”? We all have, it is com­mon in the west. A West­ern server would not have insisted on a shuffle, they would have simply served where we were. It really was not import­ant that we got the “right” meal, but it was import­ant that we sat with who we wanted to.

None of this exists in Asia and I had sim­ilar things hap­pen in coun­tries all over this con­tin­ent. Espe­cially Japan, where the nor­mally super-polite Japan­ese can turn into being, what can only be described as, “bloody insist­ent.” I sus­pect the core of it is the lan­guage bar­rier, as Eng­lish has all sorts of nuances and “ways of put­ting things” when speak­ing to soften an order into a request. To those com­ing to Eng­lish from another lan­guage, hav­ing been taught dir­ect speak­ing, they can appear rude as all hell. Once we had all had about six beers in us, the staff star­ted the hard-sell on things like pearls. They did not get very far, but Cesca did buy some postcards.

I sus­pect that the staff on these boats hate the rich west­ern­ers with their drink­ing, loud aggress­ive­ness (to us: assert­ive­ness) and incred­ible rude­ness (what the west­ern­ers call ‘being dir­ect’ or ‘plain spoken’). On the other hand, west­ern­ers prob­ably just want an authen­tic exper­i­ence without being asked to dip into their pock­ets every five seconds or the feel­ing that they are being fleeced. I think that trips like these made Cesca and I want to drop off the tour­ist routes as much as pos­sible. To break out of that bubble and into a little free­dom and hon­esty, where “tour­ists” were only nor­mal “cus­tom­ers” and “serv­ers” became “loc­als”. Such wants star­ted to pull at us and our future plans for India star­ted to take shape.

Any­way, after enough drink­ing, Cesca and I left the oth­ers to it and turned in. The boat was anchored in a peace­ful lagoon along with many oth­ers and it slowly drif­ted around the anchor. Cesca and I opened the win­dows to watch the lights of the other boats play­ing against the deep dark­ness. The sky was clear and in the dis­tance loomed the shapes of the giant karsts.

It was quite beautiful.

The next part is com­ing soon…

Regards,

Basho

Pop­ular­ity: 3% [?]

Related Posts

• Hanoi, Halong Bay and Tet New Year – Part Three!
  The travel blog­ging is back! Note: This is the third part of a com­plete three part art­icle that c…
• Hanoi, Halong Bay & Tet New Year: Part One
  The travel blog­ging is back! Note: This is the first part of a final three part art­icle that comp…
• Goa: The Beach Life
  I lay on my back and tried to relax. The sound of rolling waves crashed back and forth in the distan…
• Palaces of Hue, Viet­nam. Lost in time.
  What is left after the Amer­ican bomb­ing of Hue is not much, but it is still beau­ti­ful. Th…
• Hoi An and Hue
  The gems of Vietnam?…
• The Ellora Caves
  One of the unique things about India, and one that you never quite come to terms with, is the trains…