Can You Be My Girlfriend? Well, How About My Brother’s Girlfriend? - Halong City, Vietnam

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From Hue, we travelled North to Halong City, the place to catch boat trips out on to the lovely Halong Bay, a body of water studded with hundreds of islands and dozens of beautiful caves and karsts. When you order tea in your hotel room here you are served with a large thermos of hot water and a full china tea set featuring a teapot loaded with fifty times the amount of tea leaves we Americans are used to. Very, very strong tea. Walking around our first day, a man tried hard to sell us $400 boat trips. Although we told him that is way more than we could afford, he just kept trying! He was a very good salesman but it's like he never learned how to interpret the specific needs of each customer. We ran in to him later, and he tried to sell us the same two night, three day boat trip for $65. Um, hello?

Halong City, which most travellers skip, instead preferring to travel directly from Hanoi to Halong Bay and back, is actually a fun, little town. A lot of it is big tourist resorts and fancy restaurants, across from a fancy, modern promenade along the bay, filled with high-end stores. But the small downtown area is charming in the evening, featuring the best natural and comfortable interaction of locals and foreigners I’d yet seen in Vietnam. Young Vietnamese and young foreigners, both out for fun on the town, walk around, and hang out street-side, drinking miniature strong cups of tea and smoking big bongs filled with fresh tobacco. We play with some little local kids, whose mom seems happy for the break. She has no problem with us taking the kids in to shops and stores out of her eyesight, and she sort of seems like she‘s crossing her fingers we‘ll ask to adopt them.

Halong City lacks even a single real travel agency, which we later found out is because most travellers book their trips from Hanoi. The only choice for the stragglers that arrive in Halong City planning to book a trip is to buy trips from the businessmen that approach you on the street. So we took a chance, bought a trip and got lucky. ( A bit counter-intuitive really, you’d expect that arriving closer to the port would make it easier to depart, but not so.)

The day we were supposed to leave on our trip we could not find a single ATM that wasn't broken or that would take Mastercard. We didn’t have enough cash on us to pay for our trip. The businessman we bought our tickets from was out of town but his two cronies were very helpful, driving us to every ATM in town to try to get money, and repeatedly calling the businessman to try to work out an alternate solution. Fortunately, he said we could go on the same trip the next day, which was a Monday, when banks would be open for us to get money. The cronies took us to their hotel, which turned out to be very lovely, brand new, with a bay view and a Swedish feel, lots of light wood, fluffy white comforters, a cute wooden table with chairs for tea by the window.

We had a blast in Halong City that extra night, as the businessman and his cronies took a shine to us, and brought us out with them for some fun. We drank tea together on the street-corner and they insisted on paying for our pho. They took us on a thrilling late-night motorbike ride across the beautiful new suspension bridge, just finished by the Japanese. One asked me to be his girlfriend and then later asked me to be his brother’s girlfriend. I guess he was flexible as long as I could be someone’s girlfriend. He also asked for my phone number back in Laos so he could call me to talk despite the fact that his English was limited to one word phrases. I politely declined all offers.

Next blog...Actually getting out in a boat on Halong Bay.

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