Ha Lang Bay

14 August- Got woken up by alarm clock at 6:15 this morning and managed to croak out my good morning to the country. I had a quick shower before the phone rang - my wakeup call. I 'd received one yesterday as well, the guy who woke me up sounded more asleep than me ... Hhhheelllooo? Um ... Wak .. Mrmffmmup ... I think next time I ought to give him a wakeup call. After my morning bread and fruit I perched myself on the front step waiting for the tour bus to come and pick me up. One of the old bread sellers wandered up to me and offered me her wares - as I was still a little peckish I accepted a sugar encrusted doughnutty thing and I paid her 50000 dong (about 4 dollars, all I had) she smiled, took it and wandered off ... I grabbed her and demanded change ... She smiled and gave me 5000 and then wandered off again; I grabbed her again, 10000, not enough, another 5, eventually I managed to get 30000 change off her - I 'd still paid way too much and she had the temerity to be angry at me but I'd just had enough so I gave up. Eventually a girl came to take me to the bus for Ha Long Bay. Lots of milling around the street, nobody telling us where we were supposed to go - I was eventually told to get on a bus and was then promptly taken off it and put onto another. Very long drive to the handicapped childrens centre where we were offered trinkets and overpriced ice creams before moving on to Ha Long Bay. I'd met a very interesting English guy (from Cornwall) and we chatted the entire way to the bay. When we got to the lunch stop he was told to leave the group - me? Yes, just you ... Never saw him again, maybe we ate him. Lunch was like prison chow time - about 200 tables of eight all being servd the exact same food (squid, seaweed, fish, tofu, rice) with overpriced beer. Evntually escaped that and managed to find our guide (who, incidentally, had no idea who was in his group) and went down to the harbour to get in one of a hundred or so boats all called 'Tourist' to take us on cruise of the bay. Despite being harded around like cattle it was a rather nice day. The limestone islands are incredibly beautiful - they just spear themselves out of the water, there's hardly any beaches, no flat land at all, just virtually vertical pillars of rock scattered around as far as the eye can see. We stopped for a cave tour, also incredible, somewhat lessened by the dozens of boatloads of tourists traipising through in synchronous step (very reminscent of yesterday's visit to Ho chi minh's non-rotting corpse) and the mullti-coloured fluorescent mood lighting also didn't add to the effect. Also, like a sauna in there, very grateful to get back to the boat for a bt of a suntan and a chance to wring out my sodden t-shirt. The journey to Cat ba Island took about five hours and was, whilke very tranquil,m far too lkong for my liking. Met a golden skinned English flyboy (wannaba flyboy) and his dutch girlfriend who were very nice, and an incredibly irritating NZ family who thought I was english and recalled last night's rugby game results when they gound out where I was from. The rest of them either didn't speak a word of English (this included the guide) or didn't want to admit to speaking it to us.
Eventually made it back to the Cat Ba Island where we checked in to our hotel - I'm sharing a room with an Israeli guy whose name I can't pronounce - he seems okay though - and we went to a local restaurant for dinner (cpvered in tour ticket price) that served the exact same meal that we had for lunch.
I've been warned that touring in Vietnam involves always doing the package tours;it's very expensive and very difficult to do anything outside of this network - the Vietnamese like to know where the tourists in tcountry ar and what they are doing. It's great to see the sights if you're able to block out the peripheral images of thousands of other people doingthe exact same thing as you're doing. I remember seeing the busloads of Japanese tourists in Australia all being let off at one sight, taking photos, eating something, then piling back on to the bus for the next stop; closedly followed by the next tour. I always used to say to myself that it was a horrible way to see a country but it does make a bit more sense when i'm over here - the onlyway for all these people to see all these sights is to do it in the company of themselves - it's not that bad, still enjoying myself and it certainly doesn't make the views any less beautiful or