What we did: walked around Cat Ba Town
Budget: 1,200k Dong/$60; Spent: 1,160k/$58
Jeff here.
Not too much to report today. It was definitely a slow day, even by our standards. Patty is still not feeling 100%, so that's our excuse for not doing anything exciting.
We started off with a breakfast at a close by restaurant called Bamboo Cafe. It was an excellent breakfast, although a little on the expensive side. Afterward, we went to check out another hotel to see what kind of rate we could get. They took us up to their top floor and showed us a room there. It had a wonderful view of the bay. Nice room, too. They offered the same price as the hotel we were already at, which wasn't much of an incentive to switch hotels. When we returned to our hotel, we negotiated an included breakfast with our stay, so that we wouldn't have to pay so much for our breakfasts in the morning.
We had noticed a place just around the corner from our hotel that burned DVDs so we went to check that out. We have been looking for a place to burn our pictures onto DVDs for some time, but not had any luck. This place did so without much hassle, except the price. All in all, we got five DVDs and paid $15 for them. That sounds like a ripoff to me, but I should have haggled more. Sigh.
Patty still hadn't written the blog post for yesterday, so we thought we'd go check out a cafe recommended by Lonely Planet where she could write it. The cafe we ended up at is called Flightless Bird, and is apparently operated by a bunch Kiwis, although a local was running the place while we were there. It also had super cheap manicures and pedicures, so Patty got both. We ended up paying $5 for those, a coffee, and a Sprite. Not bad!
Unfortunately, Patty didn't have the opportunity to write her blog post because after all this we were starving and went looking for a place to eat. Of course, Patty's nails hadn't dried completely yet so the second she put her feet into her shoes her nails were ruined. This seems to happen a lot with pedicures. Makes them kinda pointless.
Anyway, we decided to return to the Bamboo Cafe for dinner. Patty chose to take it easy, since her stomach was still pretty sensitive. She ordered a vegetable soup, which was very nice. We also got some vegetable spring rolls, vegetable fried rice, and fried chicken with chili. Everything was fantastic. A huge improvement over yesterday night, in both price and flavour!
After dinner, we went on a small crusade in search of a tour group called Blue Swimmer. We got some crappy directions from a tourist ("Ya, it's like down the road that way, and you turn right at the intersection. Hypothetically, I've never actually been there"), but decided to follow them anyway. We spent the next 30 minutes walking through town having no bloody clue whether we were on the right track. The only interesting thing of note on this walk was when some hoochie-looking girl, who was sitting on the patio of a cafe with her friend, approached me and offered me a card. I declined. We are pretty sure she was offering me her services. Patty almost kicked her ass, and I don't blame her. Then again, I didn't take the card, so who knows, but neither of us are giving her the benefit of the doubt. Our lengthy journey eventually ended right back where we started, having completed a humongous loop. Awesome.
We decided it was time to ask a local. Surely, they know better! We asked the owner/operator of our hotel and he pointed down the harbour in the other direction and said it was a ten minute walk. So off we went. Ten minutes later and we're in the middle of nowhere again. We approach a building that looked like the last building for quite some time and asked about the Blue Swimmer. No one seemed to know what we were talking about, so we left. Disgruntled.
On our way home we have an epiphany: why not just look for it on Google Maps? Why not, indeed. Back at the hotel, we checked out the location and it turns out that nobody gave us good directions. We had passed a fork in the road earlier and taken the road back down to the harbour, but if we had taken the other direction and followed the pitch black, scary-looking road in the other direction it turns out we would have found the place no problem. What an ideal location for a tour office!
Anyway, so we decided to check out the other tour agency, called Cat Ba Ventures, which is a locally-owned tour operator also recommended by our book. It also happens to be located next door to our hotel. It being low-season, there are few people taking tours at this time. Unfortunately, this means higher prices. The prices aren't that much higher, and of course drop with more people taking the same tour on the same day. There was another couple on a tour we were interested in, but there was room for more so the price wasn't great. We decided to hold off and check again tomorrow.
After this we headed back to our hotel room for two serious blog-writing sessions. Thankfully, this one is short and sweet! Well, maybe just short.
Buenas Noches!
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