Pomgirl

I wake up feeling at least a gabillion times better than the previous day, sunniness personified and full of love for the world. It may have something to do with the view from our hotel room which strikes me as desolate but romantic. Even discovering the sachets of coffee in our room already have sugar added cannot spoil my mood. (The Vietnamese seem obsessed with sweetening all drinks; particularly hideous is the adding of condensed milk to coffee making it a treacle-like substance.) Anyway, I do feel quite guilty for being in a poor country and staying in a resort most people could not afford, but my newfound love of cable TV soon distracts me. I only ever watch cable TV in hotel rooms and staying in three hotels over the past week has me bingeing on the Discovery channel, watching programmes on mushroom farming, fishing in Arctic waters, the building of Beijing’s new airport, and, this morning, a strange sect called Jonestown. I don’t get to see the end of the programme because The Boy is eager for breakfast but I have the feeling everyone dies.

After breakfast we walk with our guide and the rest of the group into the centre of Cat Ba and begin realising how difficult it is for us to converse in broken English. The Boy and I are unnecessarily wordy and generally live by the philosophy of ‘why use one word when you can use several?’ which results in a number of confusing conversations. Our guide takes us to a local market where he buys dried fish and The Boy enquires about its use. “He makes tea from it…I think” he whispers to me, sounding perplexed. He wants to find out more about this strange fish tea, but the guide laughs and says “Not tea! Eat with beer!” and laughs some more. We make an effort to be more succinct from now on.

Back at the resort, The Boy goes for a massage where a small lady walks on his back while I swim in the pool and then sit in the sun listening to my ipod. Before long it is lunch and then check out time. Unfortunately, we have managed to lock ourselves out of our room and have difficulty explaining this problem to a member of staff. “Ah, special needs” she says, quite correctly, gesturing towards the check-in desk. After getting our bags we are driven to a boat, which takes us back to the quay and we board a bus for the three-hour trip back to Hanoi.

Our driver listens to muzak for the entire journey and we play ‘guess the song’ which I am rather good at but The Boy is particularly bad and doesn’t even recognise ‘Scarborough Fair’ when it is played for the second time. We are dropped back at our hotel and there is some problem with our room, meaning we have to stay somewhere else. While trying to organise this, M walks in and it is all quite confusing managing two conversations at once. She has bought us a painting by a local artist to thank us for our help and apologise for spoiling our time on the boat, which is unnecessary but very sweet. She tells us that when she got back to her hotel room there was blood everywhere as J had not been to hospital and had continued drinking instead. She took him to the French hospital, where she had been ‘til 3am that morning, while he was in surgery. We make vague plans to meet up later while also arranging to stay in another hotel, but we never do see her again.

Later in the evening, over drinks, I tell The Boy that it would be a good idea to inform me now if he is keeping any big secrets from me, like a stint in jail or a love child. M had no idea J had been in prison and deported from America until she found some documents on his computer. “You already know all about my shady past”, he tells me reassuringly.

I still wonder what happened to J and M.

I’m excited to be leaving Hanoi and the prospect of seeing more of North Vietnam. It is a bumpy three-hour drive to Halong Bay, one of Vietnam’s World Heritage Sights, passing paddy fields with workers bent over picking the bright green shoots, people selling bread by the side of the road, signs for ‘bia hoi’ and ‘pho’ everywhere, large new buildings looking strangely desolate and more being built; motorbikes carrying an array of goods – bricks, food, animals, even a large sheet of glass, a mattress, and, rather surreally, a huge ceramic dog hugged to the rider’s chest. There appears to be little that cannot be carried on a motorbike.

We arrive at a quay where every other tour bus drops its passengers - people, buses and boats everywhere. The bay is much more bustling than we expected. A small boat takes us to the larger one where we will be spending the night. There are sixteen other passengers – a mix of Spaniards, Mexicans, and Canadians, The Boy and I, and another younger couple - J, a pumped-up Korean guy and his American girlfriend, M, who we sit with for lunch. They have been together three years, first in Korea, and now in Singapore, where they are teachers. We start drinking beer and continue after lunch while we sit on the top deck of the boat and begin cruising along Halong Bay. It is a seemingly endless stretch of water with thousands of grottos and islets, which according to legend were spat out of the mouths of a family of dragons sent to fight Chinese invaders. Vietnamese history is fascinating, and always violent. The bay is covered in mist but it only adds to the eerie atmosphere. I feel incredibly lucky to be here.

The boat stops so we can walk through a cave, on the way a cute little puppy rubs against my ankles wanting pats. Our guide rushes over and announces “Dogs in Vietnam - very dangerous! But very delicious – haha!” which is a pity because dogs are one of the few things I’m not scared by whereas caves are just one of the many (which also includes water, heights, confined spaces, crowds, spiders and people wearing masks). After a particularly scary experience in a cave in Western Australia, I swore to never enter one again but I am already at the cave’s mouth and we have to go through it to get to the boat at the other side. It’s not particularly scary (or that amazing) but I still hurry through as fast as permitted. I marvel at the modern phenomenon of taking photos of oneself against/ before/with everything. It is a narcissistic age, I muse, hypocritically, but I’m just sour at being underground. Finally we are allowed back to our boat.

J and M are disappointed we are not on more of a ‘party boat’ – the other passengers are older and we whisper to each other trying not to disturb them. M has asked the captain if it is okay to go swimming in the bay – I am terrified of swimming where I cannot touch the ground, but beer has made me bold and I am soon joining them. The water is freezing, and not particularly clean. After showers, we join them for dinner. J pulls out a bottle of whiskey, one of the few spirits I rarely drink, but I don’t let that hold me back. The food is delicious, especially the catfish. We order another bottle of whiskey and pop out to the back of the boat for a cigarette break. The rest of the evening is a blur of conversations, cigarettes, another bottle of whiskey, photographs and more whiskey. At some point I stagger back to our cabin, banging into many things on the way, throw up and then pass out.

A couple of hours later The Boy wakes me, apologising but looking white-faced and freaked out. “All hell has broken loose” he tells me. M was also sick and became angry with J for not showing more concern. After she found him regaling the crew with tales about the three years he spent in an American prison for armed robbery (which she had only recently discovered) she locked herself in the bathroom of their cabin. J, who had continued drinking excessively, punched his hand through the glass door. “His blood was everywhere” The Boy tells me, “The crew started freaking out. They didn’t know what to do and wouldn’t even turn off the music, so I had to find the first aid kit and bandage him up as best I could. He was bleeding so much it was pooling around our ankles; I had to convince the captain to call for a water taxi to take him to hospital, and now the crew are pissed with me for keeping them up so late. They blame M, who has bruises on her arms and neck from J grabbing her. He’s totally lost it!” I’m half asleep and half in shock but manage to convince him to rest, not sure what else we can do and still quite drunk. “Hmm…Not quite the peaceful time we were expecting” he murmurs before falling asleep.

The Luxury!