Cat Ba Island and Lan Ha Bay

After another night on the night train back to Hanoi we hopped on a bus in the morning to go to Cat Ba Island close to the famous Halong Bay.  We wanted to go via Hai Phong as this seemed to be the easiest and quickest way, but unintentionally ended up travelling via Ha Long City which was our least preferred option. The bus dropped us off somewhere on the street next to the bridge leading to the ferry terminal. We had to take a motocycle taxi to get to the pier - just try to imagine: Moni, her big backpack, her small backpack, Alex, his big backpack, his small backpack AND the motocycle driver on one single bike! This is only possible in Asia and I wish someone had taken a picture of us. Alex almost fell off at the back because the weight of his big luggage was dragging him down, but we survived the 5-10min ride. At the end it turned out not too bad to go via Ha Long City as the ferry went through the outskirts of Ha Long Bay to arrive at the north harbour of Cat Ba Island which was more scenic than the industrial route of Hai Phong.

In Cat Ba Island we stayed in a nice family-run hostel a bit away from the main street in Cat Ba Town and organized what we want to do the coming days.
One of the main attractions is Lan Ha Bay which is the little sister of Ha Long Bay, a bit further south, much less touristic, but equally beautiful (thanks Steffi and Christian for the tipp!). We were discussing back and forth whether we should go on a daycruise or on an overnight cruise (which was of course more expensive given we are travelling on a budget), but at the end decided for the 2 day/1 night cruise with Cat Ba Ventures and did not regret it!

The next day in the morning we arrived at their office and met the rest of our group. We were only 6 people in total, together with 4 Dutch. Our guide Quien (pronounced like the "Queen" of England) was a local tour guide and a really funny chap. He knew a lot about the bay, the national park, all the nice hidden places and was very communicative. His English with Vietnamese accent was sometimes hard to understand and the funniest moment was when all 6 of us tried to find out what Quien was talking about when he mentionned a "flatty bae"!  We did not figure it out until he went into the cabin and grabbed a ... "PLASTIC BAG" :))))).

On day 1 the boat took us through floating villages and fishermen settlements into the heart of Lan Ha Bay. The local people know many stories to different limestone rock formations (e.g. turtle rock, the dolphin, the family rocks, etc) which our guide told us all. Above all there are many many rocks representing the "strong manpower".... ;)
We picked up some kayaks on the way and made a first stop at around 10:30 to go kayaking. It was a hot and sunny day and our guide brought us to some beautiful lagoons with emerald green water, impressive limestone rocks and jungle vegetation around. Best of all: we did not see a single soul and had the spot for ourselves to enjoy a nice swim in the warm and clean water.

After the morning kayak session we had lunch which was freshly prepared on the boat. If you like seafood like Alex, this was heaven, if you don't - like Moni, you need to tell the agency in advance so they prepared some other nice dishes for Moni.
In the afternoon we headed west and crossed into Ha Long Bay which is officially forbidden. Ha Long Bay is in a different province and is UNESCO world heritage, Lan Ha By is not (yet). Our guide told us that the area we sneaked in officially belongs to the Cat Ba National Park, but when the UNESCO declared Ha Long Bay world heritage they included this part of Lan Ha Bay as well and now the people of Cat Ba are fighting to get it back and have Lan Ha Bay included into the world heritage area too.
We hopped into our kayaks again and started paddling to three hidden lagoons which were simply stunning. We had to go through some tunnels and caves to arrive at beautiful lagoons on the other side. One of the tunnels was a good 150 - 200m long, yet other ones were so narrow you had to pull in the paddle and many of them were so low you needed to duck your head in the kayak. We enjoyed this excursion a lot, so many beautiful spots to discover and thanks to Moni's beloved siblings & their partners we had a waterproof Go Pro with us (on Alex' head) to take videos and pictures of all this - check out the video section as we added two videos from our spectacular kayak rides :).

Around sunset we crossed into Lan Ha Bay again for the night. Before we changed from the day boat to our sleeping boat, we did some "jumping off the boat deck and roof" into the water which was by then already slightly warmer than the temperature outside. After a short swim to a beach, the night boat had arrived and we were quite surprised to find a little luxury junk with very nice cabins, functioning aircondition, private bathroms and even jacuzzis, but don't worry, the jacuzzis did not work and we did not have warm water, but I guess none of us was expecting so much comfort on board.
After a shower and a nice dinner, we were hanging out on deck, chilling and reading while Quien had turned on the karaoke machine and was enjoying himself singing one Asian love song after the other :).

The next morning we woke up early for the sunrise and set off to explore the area with a bamboo boat before breakfast. Good old Quien had never used a bamboo boat before and was not able to row and steer the boat properly and it took us about 30 minutes to get about 100m away from the boat :). With help from the group we finally managed to make our tour with sometimes more or less difficulties before going back to the boat for banana pancakes (the mandatory tourist breakfast in Asia).

Then we headed to the north of Lan Ha Bay to explore some more lagoons. This seemed to be the place where all the day excursions go, at least we saw another 5-6 boats and many other kayakers in the water. The main attraction there was the bat cave we had to cross to get into the lagoon. As the name says the cave was full of little bats hanging around up there. Luckily we had our guide with us: while all day tourists were cruising around the main lagoon he directed us to the very far end which looked like an absolute dead end. When we already wanted to stop and turn around Quien told us "No no, there is an opening to your left, go in there"! And really, there was a small tunnel, easily overlooked, we had to turn sharply and arrived to yet another beautiful lagoon which we had all for ourselves to go for a nice swim.

After that we paddled around a bit more, returned to the boat and cruised to our lunch place. While the cook was preparing the food, we had some more time to cool off and jump off the boat into the emerald green waters in the midday heat.
After lunch, we had some time to digest and then took the kayaks again to see a very small and shallow lagoon, the favourite spot of our guide. Then we crawled on all four through some tunnel systems in the limestone on land and we went to a beautiful beach to finish off the afternoon.
We return d to Cat Ba Island at sunset and headed back to our hostel.

The next day, Alex used the opportunity to go deepwater solo climbing in the bay as Cat Ba Island offers perfect conditions to climb all the limestone formations.

So I sat off on a beautiful morning to the port with Rafael, our guide, Currie, Adam, Sean, Aparna and  Cobe. We took a small fisherman boat to ride through the floating village out into the bay. We were getting partly excited, partly nervous of what was ahead of us as it was our first solo climbing experience AND for many of us our first outdoor climbing experience.

We arrived close the spot, a relative small “rock” with an easy side to the end and more difficult routes towards the middle.

The first climb was fairly ok, a 4C I guess, up to 8 meters and then … jump. Sounds straitghtforward :) The climb was indeed easy with many holding places however arriving on the natural platform, it was time to jump. As I was the first one and it was the first jump of the day I was a bite tense. However once I jumped, it felt really good. We moved on to the next climb, a good 5B, up to the highest point today…11 meters. The climb was a bite more challenging but what was tricky was at the top. Indeed, I passed a tree root then realised that there were not so much space to put 1 foot, so imagine 2 together. Plus I had to turn facing the sea while being held to the wall…it was tricky but I managed. Then, time to jump and that was a lot higher up (for me). After few seconds, I told myself that there was not other way down so let’s do it. I did it, and I survived it only with a small cut to my oral cavity (above the teeth). We carried on climbing few other (around 5 climbs each) and then it was time for some more canoeing. The canoeing part was  quite relaxing but as we were short of time, we stay around the renting place. Hence it was not as remote and spectacular as the previous days.

In any case, solo climbing is real fun and a lot of adrenaline so I would recommend it to all my climbing friends

Meanwhile, Moni rented a motorcycle, cruised around the island a bit and decided to laze around the beach until Alex' return. Even in the afternoon, we both felt lazy and went to the beach again to relax and read a bit.
In the late afternoon we drove up to cannon fort and watched the sun set over Cat Ba.

The next day was again a travel day as we left the island to go to the Phong Nha National Park which is famous for its tremendously big caves (the biggest cave on earth is in this national park) which were only recently discovered (as of the 1990s) and many of them only open since 2014/2015.
We will let you know how our cave exploration went with the next article.

Hoping all is fine in Europe or wherever you are :).
Cheers,
Alex & Moni