Virle had a rougher night of it than me, sleeping fitfully on the bus, which proved to be a fairly elderly sleeper, lacking basic amenities like curtains to keep out the LED displays which seem to adorn just about any Vietnamese settlement of any size.
Sleeper seats are never the best at best – just not flat enough for comfortable sleeping. I managed to avoid all this by aping the reserve driver who, spurning the seats altogether, lay flat out on the padded floor between the seats. It was narrow, and cramped, and I lay awake for what seemed an age, wondering if I’d ever be able to drop off, then all of a sudden I came round and thought ‘hang on, are we on the ferry?’ Which indeed proved to be the case, meaning we were almost there, and I’d managed a good five or six hours asleep.
No thank youing the usual cluster of taxi drivers, we walked the five or six minutes to our hotel, to be shown up to our room on the fifth floor. The moment we entered, we were hit by an overwhelming stench of damp. We made a cup of tea, opened the window, and waited to see if it would clear. Noticing, meanwhile, unsightly rusty stains down the wall, and tangled wiring dangling down behind the wonky television. Not to mention dirt on surfaces that even the most cursory clean would have removed.
The smell failed to dissipate, and our mood, even making allowance for our jangled state, didn’t improve either. ‘Sod it,’ I said, ‘This room sucks. We can do better. It’s not like there’s any shortage of places in town.’ Three minutes googling flagged up a place two minutes walk away with excellent reviews, at two-thirds the price of the scuzziest supposedly three star hotel I’ve ever been in. So we grabbed our rucksacks, headed down to reception, and, resisting the temptation of an alternative room, buggered off up the road to the Mountain Pearl Hotel, where the cheery manager let us knock him down on the price of a nice room, with no damp.
After a modest but tasty enough breakfast we set off to walk the twenty minutes or so to the exotically named Cat Ba beach 3. I insisted that you couldn’t call this drizzle, much less rain, but Virle insisted this was exactly what the word drizzle meant. But it was very light, barely enough to dampen.
It steadily picked up as we approached the beach though, flatly contradicting the forecast, which had promised a lunchtime clear up leading to a sunny afternoon. We took shelter under some reedy brollies, wondering how long it would be until someone came along and demanded cash for the ‘sunbeds’. About five minutes, as it turned out. And the grumpy old woman was demanding 100,000 a pop. For two, almost the price of our room for the night. Obviously that was never going to happen, so we decamped and headed for the only other shelter – a bar – just as rain proper kicked in.
The prices were as you’d expect from a bar on the beach, but we ordered one Hanoi beer – at 35,000 the best value in town – which was enough to secure a seat for V while I went off for a swim in the rain. And very nice it was too – I haven’t, now I think of it, had a proper swim in quite a while.
And that’s been pretty much it for today. The promise of afternoon sunshine has come to naught, so after a snack lunch we’ve returned to our room (dry) for a lazy, snoozy afternoon. Hoping things will improve on the morrer, though we do have plan Bs, involving hire scooters, walks in the national park, and other such diversions, should perfect beach weather fail to materialise.
Still, fingers crossed for sunshine. We’ve only a few days left; and that, when all’s said and done, is what we’re here for.