Night on Cat Ba Island

So much for a lie in this morning, we were all woken up at 6am when they turned on the engines in order for us all to be up for a 7am breakfast. We ate breakfast and had to be out of our rooms for 8am so that they could start cleaning them for the next set of people who arrive on the boat at around 11am.
We arrived on Cat Ba Island just before 11am where we left Charlie behind on the boat as he had only booked the 1 night trip.  The remaining people caught a coach which took us to the bottom of Ngu Lam Peak which was 225m high with a viewing platform at the top.  We asked our guide if we could just go to the hotel as none of us really felt like climbing the peak in this heat and with a hangover.  His response was shocking.  We had two options, climb the peak with him or sit and wait in or around the coach.

I decided to climb the peak thinking that it would be cooler up there rather than down here and I would only be here once so I might as well go and have a look

Halong Bay

.  Others decided to stay at the bottom.  Setting off from the coach and instantly we found a butterfly sitting in a tree, it was huge.  This butterfly, which the picture doesn't really show its size very well, but it must have been at least 30cm across it wings.  At first I wasn’t even sure if it was real, so when everyone had finished taking a photo, I shook the tree a little to see if it moved.  It didn’t fly away but it did close its wings up.
The climb up the mountain was very hard, very hot and seemed to take ages.  It only took about an hour to climb up to the viewing platform, but by the time we got to the top everyone was soaked in sweat, yuck!  The only advantage of being up at the top was that there was at least a breeze to cool you down before you had to head back.  Most people sat around for about 30 minutes at the top just to cool down and then we headed back down joining up with everyone else before getting on the coach and heading in to Cat Ba town.

In the town we were all dropped off at different hotels, depending on which company people had bought tickets from, so I ended up in the same hotel as Rob and Sara who today after not really showing themselves yesterday on the boat were a lot more calmer and friendlier now that they had slept off their hangovers

.  The others all went to a different hotel.  When I had checked in, I was told to be ready at 2pm as we were getting a boat to a place called Monkey Island, obviously named that because there were monkeys on the island and there was also a beach, which many of the islands in ha long bay didn’t have.
On the way out to Monkey Island we passed many floating houses in the bay and once on Monkey Island there wasn’t really much to do but swim in the sea or climb up the hill to go and see the monkeys.  All I did was go for a swim and then lie on the beach, while some of the monkeys decided to come down to the beach and steal peoples bags and run off in to the woods.  Ha Ha!  Glad they didn’t take my stuff.

We spent a couple of hours on the Island and then we were taken back to cat ba Island and back to our hotels where we were told to be ready for 7pm for dinner.  I didn’t really want another seafood dinner the same as all the other food that we had eaten on this 3 day trip so I decided to have a nap.  At 7.15pm I had a knock on the door saying "Dinner time, everyone’s waiting", so I felt like I should get up and join them.  And YES, it was the same food again.
After dinner all of us decided to go to a Beer Hai bar on the street where it was 5,000 dong (18p) per glass, and have a few beers while we sat around chatting.  By about 10pm everyone was really tired so we all went back to our separate hotels and went to bed.
copy right by: travelpod.com