After two days in Hanoi and three cities on my own, I was ready for an organized tour. The plan was to go East to Halong Bay, a stretch of water filled with small, uninhabited limestone cliffs and one big island called Cat Ba.
From Hanoi, you take a bus three hours to reach the boat dock where boats leave regularly for excursions into the bay or ferry you over to one of the inhabited islands. The last thing I wanted to do was get off another bus in a strange place, figure out how to get into and across Halong Bay, how much it should cost and where I should stay when I did get off the boat. Organized tour, here I come.
Still, I had reservations about an organized tour. What if I was surrounded by white haired couples wearing hip sacks and white hats and sniffing around for things to complain about, like the sun shining too intensely and the abundance of Asian food? What if I was revisited by the lost soul backpackers I had left smoking the day away while strumming their sad guitars in Guesthouse Number 9, Phnom Penh? Or what if it was just me and Dutch travel guy offering longwinded tales of superior travelers?
I arrived at Kangaroo Cafe, my tour agent, at 8:30am. The tour agent called everyone for Halong Bay tour over to the bus and I held my breath, wondering who would get up from their seats. It was one recent graduate who lived in a London suburb, a few friendly looking couples, one older gentleman, and two rugged looking men, one with a guitar and devil sticks packed in his bag and the other with hiking boots and wool socks. I tucked my head into a book and hoped for the best.
Halfway through the trip, the back of the bus exploded with laughter and conversation, which didn't need to be loud enoughto travel all the way to the front of the bus. I pictured the guy with the devil sticks and the other with the wool socks leading the show. The quiet couple to my left slept most of the way and gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Another couple was seated in front of the sleeping couple. When the woman spoke to him, it was in loud, ringing tones -- comments on his tone of voice and how he addressed her. He replied in embarrassed whispers, or what I interpreted to be embarrassed whispers. I for one was embarrassed. I kept reading, the fate of the trip still hanging in the balance.
We arrived at Halong City and boarded the boat. We spent the afternoon warming up to one another while the boat coasted through the flat aqua sea and the limestone islands lay ahead in the haze of the horizon. The islands were black and gray formations in the haze so that they looked like mirror images and ghost shadows of each other, blurred and layered impressions, one rising out of another making it difficult to trace the edge of any one. I met a few of the couples, found out that some of them were not couples at all. One couple was from Ireland, another from Melbourne. The sleeping couple were students, one studying computers and the other a painter. The guy with the devil sticks and the other with the wool socks were the quietest ones on tour, going to bed early and keeping to themselves. The older man was the father of the guy with devil sticks, a surgeon who was full of interesting stories. The three of them lived in Tasmania, an island off the coast of Australia.
We floated through the bay. Up close, the limestone cliffs were gray rock with drips of black and white, as if they were painted in soot and bird droppings. Some of them were covered in clusters of dark green trees and bare patches of rock. We continued to float and talk until the flat waters of the bay turned to glossy black and the engines turned off for a night's rest. The night was peaceful for everyone except the girl in the cabin next door who had two roaches drop on her head. The second incident prompted her to gather her blankets and sleep on the top deck, her boyfriend in tow. They stayed up most of the night listening to mice chase each other around the boat, which was preferable to swiping cockroaches off their foreheads. I spent a restless night wondering if a cockroach could penetrate a mosquito net sweating and sunken into my foam mattress.
Up at sunrise the next morning. The banging and rattling of breakfast being made up above our cabin gave us little choice. The bay was a milky green in the dawn and a cool breeze on the top deck made the early risers tuck their hands under their elbows and hunch. We floated past working villages. We visited a cave where two 2000 year old Chinese skeletons had been discovered. Our guide gave us some history lessons about the Chinese's real involvement in the American war.
The next stop was monkey island where a wild monkey curled into my lap and played with my sunglasses, uninvited. When he was done in my lap, he cruised over to another girl's bag and starting prying open the zipper. She shrieked and he nipped her on the finger. He broke the skin but she wasn't foaming at the mouth or biting anyone on the return trip home, so we assumed everything was okay.
We spent the night in Cat Ba island getting to know each other, breaking everyone's first impression of each other. By the time we returned to Hanoi, we were following each other to hotels, making plans for drinks that night and excursions over the weekend, thankful that we had been put together and not with any others, our fears of an organized tour allayed.
