Lodging on Cat Ba like Vietnamese officials

If it comes to water, it’s all about safety first

On the second day of our tour through Halong Bay we learned that our tour wouldn’t continue as usual the next morning and we’d have to go back to the mainland directly because the whole area would be hit by a typhoon.

We had to take a different bus and boat the next morning and for the first time I realized, that in Asia you really had to hurry and be the first one to get anywhere.

Since it was raining cats and dogs, we searched shelter in a small shack next to the boat terminal instead of waiting in line with our suitcases like some other people did. It was a funny observation that on 10 Asians they only let 1 tourist on the boat. But being Swiss we thought they would take care of everybody and get us off the island. So we were the last group of people on a boat and the boat before that had left 15min ago, when they announced that no more boats were allowed on the water today. We couldn’t believe it but a nice Vietnamese family who was in the same situation as us kindly informed us that this indeed was the case and so we all got off the boat and back onto the bus to drive back to Cat Ba. There were some tears from other people who would miss their flights but for us it was only a nuisance.

tying up all the signs, that they won’t fly away

First, the travel agency offered all the stranded people a free lunch (the bus in the morning did leave an hour late…) and then they wanted to arrange our hotels (we already saw that our hotel from the previous night was locked, it probably wasn’t safe in a typhoon with all the glass windows).
Apparently, the woman from the nice Vietnamese family was a journalist and since she wanted to go to the press with this, suddenly the major of Cat Ba was in our restaurant and said that we would all have a free night at the building, where the Vietnamese officials usually stay. That was very kind of them. At that time we still didn’t know how big the storm was going to be and that building looked strong. We felt a bit like refugees. The blinds were shut at the front door because the door would blow open all the time otherwise.
Later in the evening, the Vietnamese declared the storm had ended for suddenly, everybody was out and about again, despite the strong winds that were still there. Other than a few fallen branches, there was no damage. Apparently, the storm had hit harder further down the coast and even inland.

The next day, we would have spent another day on the island if we had waited for anybody to inform us about anything. Many people from our refugee group went to enquire information about when  boats were leaving and everybody got back with different answers. Then suddenly within 10min indeed a bus was leaving and we all hurried to the station. We met some more people from the day before at the pier and realized that still no boat had left yet. In total, there were 3 boats parked and although they repeatedly said that they don’t have the permission to leave, everybody just got onto the boats and filled them up and waited, like on a strike. We did the same since we now knew that we had to be with the first ones. And sure enough, 15min later, we managed the 30min journey to the mainland without a problem.

After all, it didn’t turn out too badly for us and we met some really nice people along the way 🙂