This travel blog is a way for us to remember our travels better, and hopefully provide useful tips to others along the way. Any proceeds from posts with this disclaimer will go to the charity of choice for the given country we're traveling in. After some researching we've picked Vietnam Relief because of their focus on children and good results. I will personally double the final amount.
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A long and sleepy bus ride and a short rickety speedboat ride later, we were on the island of Cat Ba. The trip wasn't over yet, though. Boarding a bus at the harbor, we were taken across the island to our final destination.
Half wild vegetation, half industrial waste burning and trash incineration along our path, Cat Ba is an interesting mixture of attitudes and lifestyles we'll encounter through the rest of our trip.
Cat Ba is a small tropical island in the Halong Bay. Allegedly, it's named after the legend of the three mysteriously killed Tran dynasty women whose bodies floated each to a separate beach of the island. The locals then built a temple for each, and the island was called Cat Ba - Women's Island.
We booked a family owned hotel there (family owned in Vietnam means that the family also lives there) and were dropped off at the door.
It having been a long trip, we decided to use the evening to explore just a little and get a bite to eat.
Everything was happening on our street. It was home to stray dogs, croaking roosters, drying laundry, and sun-drying fish, as well as playful children. It also had piles of trash either burning or set up for incineration.
The Vietnamese culture and economy exploded rapidly as borders opened up and wars waned off in the second half of the last century. A lot of their pre-war infrastructure - which looks to have been colorful and optimistic - was abandoned when the conflicts started and never renewed.
Their economy exploded as plastic infected the world, but they seem to never have taken measures to recognize its potential to destroy the planet and their surroundings.
As such, many do not recognize trash as an issue. It is as if they are blind to it. The food leftovers, wrappings, empty bottles - it's all thrown onto the floor, whenever and wherever. On trains, on walkways, through car windows while driving - the streets are filled with trash both plastic and organic and no one is bothering to pick it up. Even in restaurants, you'll see floors piling up more and more trash until the owner or a staff member grabs a broom and simply sweeps it all into the street or into the nearby body of water.
After sunset, the street transformed into a charming display.
Tet lights brought much needed color to it, and added vibrancy and charm to the moped riders and soccer playing children, all too eager to greet Westerners with a cheerful "Hello!". Their "Hellos" would follow us throughout the rest of the trip, and eventually our replies turned from "Hello" to "Xin Chao".
Finishing our short walk along the Cat Ba bay, we settled in at Green Mango, a seafront restaurant with local food.
The food was served almost too Westerner-friendly, but still had a local touch and flavor. The image above is a set of spring rolls with fresh shrimp and spicy seabass-pineapple soup.
The streets of Cat Ba are packed with street food vendors and where there aren't vendors, there are people grilling, cooking, and chatting, or just burning things right on the sidewalk in front of their lodging.
The community is tightly knit and everyone is very friendly, welcoming to both fellow locals and foreigners. Tet seems to be a time of great socialization.
It was on that main street that we encountered several "banana pancake" vendors - Bahn Kep Thai Lan, a very popular dish there.
It's hard to describe the experience of watching the creation of this pancake.
The old lady, who spends her hours hounding and pleading passers-by with vague "please come to me" calls like a siren of the pancakes, first took the pancake batter and what can only be described as sprayed it onto the hot surface. A surface which she first repeatedly tested with her hand for the proper temperature. If skin starts sticking to it, it's ready. She then took a spatula and spread this thin layer out until it was thin enough for the metal to start showing through it.
While waiting for the pancake to fry she multitasked: she handled some money, put things away in the cart, put some trash away, peeled mango, continued her siren calls to tourists who passed by, and more.
The finished product was a work of art. Scraped from the sizzling metal surface into a truly razorblade-thin pastry, she placed exactly four slices of banana / mango onto it, folded it up into a triangle, and put it - and here's the kicker - into a paper cone made of used printing paper. I think my paper was some kind of invoice, but it wasn't readable once the pancake stuck to it and the printer ink came off, adding much needed flavor to the pancake. The snack itself was mediocre at best, but the experience that came with it was 5-star original local street cuisine.
We decided we needed a disinfectant after this experience, so we stopped by The 25 Klub, a newly opened restaurant / bar and had some extremely large shots of rum. The place was so new it didn't even have a TripAdvisor entry yet. It was there that we met a very enthusiastic and welcoming young owner, prompting us to come for dinner some time soon and asking us for help with TripAdvisor and getting placed on the map. We couldn't help with TripAdvisor, but we could come for dinner two days later.
We invited some friends we met on a Cat Ba adventure (more on that in a future post) for dinner there. The restaurant was small and completely packed, their newly opened doors seemingly appealing to both locals and tourists.
Unfortunately, the place was a bit too popular for its launch days. Amidst the flood of customers, an actual flood occurred. Some pipes burst in the kitchen right as they ran out of ingredients to complete all the orders. The owner was extremely apologetic and sweet so we stuck through it all.
We were eventually offered free fried beef rice as a way of making up for missing fruit pancake batter (?!) but we turned this offer down and asked for the bill. This was the only time in Vietnam we had seen an upset local - he had a little breakdown in the kitchen due to the string of bad luck of that day, and as I got up to pay him, I came this close to giving him a hug.
Losing temper - whether you're in a queue, getting bad service, not reaching an understanding with price, or having a dispute for any other reason or even just frowning at someone - is not acceptable in Vietnam. It causes "losing face" with the other party and in a way disgraces them.
You see, in Vietnam, the smile is sometimes hidden but there's a lot hidden behind the smile.
The photo above was taken in Hoi An, the Precious Heritage Art Gallery Museum, a special experience which we'll write more about later.
The Vietnamese will smile when satisfied, apologetic, ashamed, sorry, thankful, remorseful. It's a mask they wear expertly, and you have to play along at the risk of offending.
Their culture also values monetary appearance and having "big face". As Lonely Planet puts it:
"Having 'big face' is synonymous with prestige, and prestige is particularly important. All families, even poor ones, are expected to have elaborate wedding parties and throw their money around like it's water in order to gain face. This is often ruinously expensive but far less distressing than losing face.
Our encounter with the distressed restaurant owner remains the only instance of a visibly upset Vietnamese person. It's a shame, because the food was absolutely delicious, and we originally picked his restaurant due to its surprising cleanliness for the area. We were very happy with what we got, and we'd definitely come back - despite all the problems - if we visited Cat Ba another time.
This wasn't the whole of our Cat Ba adventure, though. The real adventures happened in between the meals. More about that in our next post.
