In Vietnam I had booked a four-day Halong Bay boat tour. When I arrived at the harbour it was wet, foggy and felt as if I still were in England.
My boat featured a huge dragon which had been hastily carved from wood and sloppily painted red. Most of its features were worn away by the wind — prompting a French girl to remark that even he looked sick of the weather.
Inside the boat there was a decrepit restaurant and a depleted bar. Cheap curtains swung in the wind and open electric cables decorated the walls. I moved to the deck to take a look at the famous limestone pillars. That had been optimistic. It was so foggy I could barely see where the boat ended and the water began. I tried to light a cigarette but the wind snapped it in two. I stood there with the soggy remains flopping from my lips, like a character from a bad sitcom.
“You want to buy more cigarettes?”
Who said that?
“Hey!” the voice persisted. “You! Up there! You want to buy something?”
I pressed my hands on the rails and peered overboard.
A woman selling groceries had tied her rowboat to ours.
“How much for water?” I shouted.
“Thirty-thousand dong!” she yelled back.
“That’s too much. I’ll give you 10,000.”
The woman grabbed her hat and shook her head.
“OK,” I shouted. “What’s your best price?”
“Twenty-nine-thousand dong!”
“No way!” I yelled. “That’s a ridiculous price for water — especially when we’re surrounded by it!”
I took a step back and waited for her to change her mind. A moment passed, then another. I peered over the rails again. I could just about make out the shape of her hat as she rowed towards another passenger boat — clearly business was so good out here she didn’t need to negotiate.
There are 3,000 islands in Halong Bay and most are uninhabited. Steeped in mist, they rise mythically from the sea. As you approach, the furthest limestone pillars seem blurred, but as you come closer their outlines thicken and the peaks are shaded in — it is like watching an invisible artist at work. That’s what my guide book said; I couldn’t see a fucking thing.
Before we set off a beer had cost 18,000 dong (which is expensive). As soon as we left the harbour the price increased to 20,000. A Danish woman asked how this could be possible. “There’s nowhere else to buy it now,” smiled the barman. The price had continued to increase ever since. At this rate, by the end of the trip a beer would cost the equivalent of a house.
A group of American girls had brought wine with them, but to drink your own alcohol you had to pay $10 each time you opened a new bottle. So they sat in silence with their unopened bottle of wine on the table – it looked like the most depressing party in the world.
We had been promised a tour guide, but — as it turned out — the barman was it.
“The blue building on the raft is a school,” he said as we passed some floating villages. “There is only one teacher and the children row to class each morning.”
“Do the people here do a lot of fishing?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “They catch shellfish on the bottom of their homes.”
“How do they do that?”
“I don’t know. But see those rocks? Many people think they look like two chickens kissing, but some crazy funny Americans said the chickens look like they are fighting!”
He laughed so hard I thought he might collapse.
“Crazy, crazy people! They were funny, but they were crazy!”
I wrestled open the door and battled through the gale toward the restroom. Along the way I found the Americans huddled together on a bench and drinking wine straight from the bottle. A few hours ago they had been sophisticated girls with a passion for wine — now they looked like hobos on a street corner.
“Classy,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” one replied.
The next morning we anchored at Cat Ba Island. It was freezing cold and the air reeked of dead fish. All of the hotels had names like: “Sunrise,” “Paradise” and “The Pacific” — which in the drizzle seemed bleakly ironic.
It took me a long time to find an open shop. On the counter were a random assortment of goods: two mangoes, three packs of cigarettes, a small bag of pumpkin seeds, a few boiled lollipops and two loaves of bread. I bought half the mangoes and all the bread — this was the kind of trip where it was best to have something in reserve.
In the afternoon, I met an American guy who lived in China. He was allergic to MSG — a popular food flavour enhancer in Asia. Being allergic to MSG here was the equivalent of moving to England and discovering you’re allergic to sarcasm.
The only other thing open was an Internet cafe — so we went inside. The owner led us to two computers at the end of the line. She switched them on. Neither responded.
“No computer,” she shrugged.
We spent the rest of the afternoon failing to find an alternative.
In the evening, the American girls joined us and together we walked the freezing promenade. It felt like a scene from a movie —in which we were returning from the funeral of a dead friend or something.
“Hello!” said a woman standing in a shop doorway, “I give you massage and boom boom?”
“We don’t want boom boom,” replied the American. “We want heat heat.”
With nothing better to do, we found a hotel bar, got drunk and complained about the trip. You could say we were being entitled and ungrateful — and perhaps we were, but it’s important to record the disappointing travel experiences as well as the great ones, because on a bad day in our home country we tend to see ‘getting away’ as the answer to everything — when in reality dreary experiences can happen whilst travelling, too.