The night at the hostel was not good at all, the rooms didn´t have ceilings so we could hear everything what was happening in the other rooms. The couple in the room next to us even taught it would be a brilliant idea to handwrite letters with the light on until way past 2 am.

 

The first night we overslept, but today new guests arrived at 7 am and made again a lot of noise. But no time to complain, we got up, had breakfast and went to see Cat Cat village.

 

Because we knew the place already we drove quite fast and missed the tollhouse where we would have had to pay an entrance fee. The guard ran behind us but the brakes on the bike were so bad especially downhill and with the two of us on it, so there was no way of stopping…

 

 

After a short hike trough the village we came to the waterfall where the indigenous people lived hundreds of years ago and now the old watermills have been reconstructed to show how life has been back then.

 

 

In the afternoon we got new engine oil and got the brakes fixed from a mechanic for 9 euros. The upper part of Sa Pa is as little appealing as the lower part. It´s neither clean, nor maintained. Potholes in the street and on the sidewalk, leftover cement and stones from construction sites and a lot of plastic lying around made the us want to get out of the city as fast as possible.

 

The ruins of a monastery abandoned during the second world war have been advertised as one of the top things to visit in Sa Pa, but more spectacular than the ruin was the way to get there and that we did not even arrived in the parking lot with our bike and half a dozen of woman surrounded us to sell us some stuff.

 

The ruin itself was small and full of rubbish. I don´t mind paying an entrance fee for a place, but then please take care of it and clean the place. Again, not appealing if I have to pay attention while taking pictures to avoid getting plastic bags and cups in the frame.

 

 

After having a late lunch ( not good ) we got our bags from the homestay and went to the sleeping bus to get to Ha Long bay.  No special bike compartment in the bus, they just placed them sideways in the trunk.

 

 

We were supposed to arrive in Ha Long at 5h30-6am which would have been fine because the sun starts rising then and the ferry starts operating at 7am. But we did arrive at 2h30, got kicked out of the bus in the rain and were lucky that the manager of a hotel just got up at this time to offer us and the other people a room. MUST have been coincidence…

 

We slept for a few hours before heading to the ferry and set over to Cat Ba.

 

 

 

 

This went astonishingly well apart from the rain which started half of the 40 minute drive from the harbour to Cat Ba town. We checked in and went for a walk and have lunch.

 

 

The rain got worse and worse and the sightseeing tour was quickly ended and we ended up in our Hotel  until we went out again to have dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had to get up early because a driver waited for us outside of the Hotel to get us to our cruise around Cat Ba. The weather was better then the last days which is nice if you have to spend the whole day on a boat driving trough the Unesco world heritage of the Ha Long bay.

 

 

After a small kayaking trip and some snorkeling where I even got Fabienne to jump into the water with me we drove to Monkey Island to grab a beer and watch the monkey fight over bananas, female monkeys and the toilet paper roll one of them stole from the toilet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because I read somewhere the ferry would be driving every 30 minutes I did not check the timetable the next morning and taught we would have time to visit Canon fort.

 

 

 

Unfortunately when we got to the harbour at 9h45 we would have had to wait over 3 hours for the next ferry and so we taught we would be lucky after a “captain” approached us. We bargained him down from 32 to 20 euros for the trip. But the whole thing ended up still being kind of a trap.

 

 

The boat was hardly larger than our bikes are and we were the only two passengers. After we took of he tried to bargain again because he had hurt himself trying to load the bikes. A harsh, “then drive us back” made him take the 20 euros and we werr good to go.

 

 

Because he was not a official ferry, he had no right to let us leave the boat in the harbour… If we would have known that we would have to unload the bikes into the knee deep water and drive trough the beach to get to a road we would have just waited for the next ferry.

 

 

After getting to the road again we were still able to laugh about this adventure, well kind of…

 

 

4 hours of driving madness we finally reached Ninh Binh.