Karst away

9 April - 16 April 2017

Ninh Binh

From our remote village of Lam Son with no foreigners we travelled to Ninh Binh, which is well back on the tourist trail. The people in Saigon who put us onto it described it as Halong Bay with rice paddies instead of ocean, which is about right: massive limestone cliffs rising straight up all around you, and plenty of flocks of tourists on the main routes. We stayed in a great home stay with a local family and were well looked after. The roads here were great. Good surface, and just unbelievable canyon views. If you really hated crowds you could skip Halong bay altogether and just do the boat ride down the river through multiple caves here.

And I once again totally fail to capture how great a place is with my lacklustre photography, Nice foreground though.

While in Ninh Binh we visited Bai Dinh temple, the largest temple in Vietnam. It was indeed a very large temple, with a massive complex of multiple buildings to walk around and hills to climb. We explored for quite a while, but it was the highest hottest it's been so far - 39 degrees but with the humidity it felt like 44 - so we cut the exploring short today.

Enormous temple is enormous.

WOO GIANT TURTLE! It was too hot for decency.

Cat Ba Island

From Ninh Binh we travelled to Cat Ba island. The island is an alternative place to stay as a starting point for Halong Bay tours, and has plenty of caves and karsts of it's own too. We had a great hotel that looked out over the harbour and had raw cliff rock as the corridor wall on the opposite side.

We took a day trip by boat around technically-not-actually-Halong-Bay-but-basically-the-same the next day. It was pretty sweet cruising along with the big limestone cliffs coming out of the water. The boat trip included kayaking around a bay. We split away from our group to go into a cave, ignoring a "no entry - danger" sign. Once we had gone as far as we could into the cave we tried to turn around and get out. There was quite a strong current that was sweeping us further into the dark end of the cave. With a little bit of team work and after a few stern words Frank and I got out of the cave - minus Frank's sunglasses. [This passage is the minimum agreed upon description. You can two quite different versions that go into more detail...]

The boat also stopped off at Monkey Island. This was a random island in the middle of the park which has somehow become a stopping off point for the day trips in this area. The main attraction on the island are the monkeys. They have been introduced onto the island as a tourist attraction and rely on what the tourists feed them since they apparently can't feed themselves in this habitat. The shop on the island sells half bananas for the tourists for this purpose. We got much amusement from watching people who were busy feeding the bananas to monkeys as the monkeys would sneak up behind them and grab the extra bananas from their pockets or bags and scare the shit out of the people. There were lots of google results for "monkey island bite." A bit later we climbed to the top of Monkey Island for a break from the entertainment. 

Frank on a rock

Mark on another rock.

So many rocks!

OK back on the boat.

Heading to North Vietnam

We left Cat Ba island to head to the north. The ferry from Cat Ba island to the mainland travelled through the scenic karsts shooting out of the water. Once we got back to the mainland we headed towards Quang Uyen. We made some scenic detours on the way. 

Including the obligatory rickety suspension bridge.

Frank's favourite. I had to stop taking photos when we ended up in tangle of dead-end roads in a village where Google maps completely lied to me about the existence of a scenic detour loop.

We also experienced Vietnamese road policing in all of its glory. As we were driving along in the middle of nowhere we came across a huge queue of trucks, initially it just seemed to be one of the random truck checkpoints that you come across now and then. But then the queue kept going and going. Because we were on the bikes we were, along with all of the others on bikes, able to weave our way in and out of the trucks and continue making progress.  Eventually we came across the culprit, a truck lying half in the gutter on the side of the road and slewed across one and a half lanes of the two lane road.

For some reason, the Vietnamese decided he best solution to this was to get another truck to come and unload the boxes from the crashed truck into the new truck, using like three guys. This was stopping traffic in both directions for miles. There were literally over a hundred trucks queued up waiting for this blockage to be cleared (long narrow windy road so no way to back up or turn around if you're a truck) and this was on a fairly low traffic road, these guys had been there for hours. Even on motorbikes it took us ages to get through because there were a few cars that could squeeze through the remaining gap coming in fits and starts down the road, and then a bus taking many minutes testing whether or not he could quite fit through the gap. Meanwhile there are no road signs warning about this, no diversions in place, no frigging control of the traffic that was trying to push its through what remained of the road and just clogging everything up even worse, just a few police ineffectively standing around smoking. Holy balls did this make me appreciate NZ/ general first world standards of competence and policing traffic control and the existence of tow trucks.

Phew. Before heading to Hanoi we took a day trip to Ban Gioc waterfall. The river and waterfall is the natural border between Vietnam and China and this is the second-biggest trans-national waterfall in the world after Niagara. I crossed a bridge and took a a cheeky detour up to border of China a few km before this (where the border veered away from the river a bit) and poked my head over to look at the brand new and empty road on the other side of the row of stone markers and think idle thoughts about how easy it would be to have a real outlaw motorcycle trip before resolving to be law abiding and stick to proper border crossings.

So on I went towards the falls, figuring I'd be forced back across the river when the time came down a little detour to a marketplace in roughly the right area. I'd expected more signage for such a major tourist attraction, but oh well. I parked and carried on down a pathway, and suddenly noticed that all of the signage was in Chinese now. Huh, odd, I guess they get lots of Chinese tourists here. I continued down towards the falls, getting steadily more confused as I started passing officials in unfamiliar uniforms and the tourists started looking 100% Chinese.

So it turns out border control is really lax in that part of the world, who knew? I realised I had casually waltzed into China and started worrying about the fact that I was pretty obviously the only white person here and it wouldn't be hard to work out that I hadn't come from the same side as everyone else. I decided trying to get one of tourist boats to ferry me across would probably make it worse, and skulked back the way I had come. Whoops.

Waterfalls. I am just to the right of the falls in the crowd of people somewhere...

We turned back south and spent that night in a small village on the main highway. We walked down to a local restaurant where we had the best pork ribs ever. While we were there a group of locals forcibly and repeatedly shared their rice wine with us. It was pretty potent stuff! It was a great way to end the last of our road trip adventuring though. From there we planned to have one last massive day in the saddle to get to Hanoi and find some new owners for the bikes.