Hải Phòng

Sapa to Hanoi to Cat Ba was our day last Friday. The wonderful train journey, was followed by a couple of hours nursing a coffee back in the Hanoi smog before our limousine bus picked us up for a transfer across to Halong Bay, a quick ferry crossing and then onto Cat Ba, an island on the other side of the bay.

Journeys like these sound tedious and long but as somebody said to me recently, the journeys are as much of the experience as the destination. He was dead right, particularly it seems in Vietnam. The limo bus was all leather reclining seats, charging points and loads of space. Not bad for about £12.

A great start then came undone, when another hotel advised us that they had a problem with our room and we would have to stay elsewhere that night. Explaining that we had had similar room changes in Hanoi and that we were not doing that again, we changed hotels and stayed for the duration.

The whole idea of going to Cat Ba was to avoid the much busier and crowded Halong Bay itself and to explore the limestone crag seascape of Lan Ha Bay. Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites and everybody that we had spoken to at home said we ought to visit. What we hadn’t planned on, however, was more mist and grey skies. Having melted in Bangkok in early March, it now seems like an age since we could comfortably wear shorts and t-shirts.

Five to ten years ago, Cat Ba was quiet and slightly off the beaten track with Halong being easier and quicker to get to for a cruise amongst the amazing sight of hundreds of krasts (the big limestones thingys). Now Cat Ba is pretty much a construction site. There are new buildings going up everywhere and whilst it was still not that crowded, that was because it was March and not high season. Having been unlucky with our original hotel, we were fortunate that we were towards the harbour area and away from the 24/7 building sites.

This location was also handy for the boat tours that we took. There are so many options for getting out on the bay from 3 day/2 night cruises, to 1 night trips, to sunset cruises. We opted initially for an evening bioluminescent plankton trip - kayaking in the dark around the krasts with the water glowing blue and green with each paddle stroke. The name is a bit of a mouthful but the experience was an amazing natural phenomonen. Another super guide found the right spots and the boat provided a wonderful Vietnamese feast of local dishes including oysters hauled out of the water at the kayaking station.

Our second day in Cat Bay had 2 objectives - completing an arduous trek through the national park and making sure that there was a bar showing a partcular football match the next day. The trek was fantastic covering about 14kms across easy paths, jungle trails, rocky climbs and an awful, muddy descent which went on forever. Only 1 tumble but the whole walk was accompanied by very wet and very warm rain.

We arrived drenched at the end of the trail, to find that we needed to hire bikes for a 6km cycle down to the harbour where we then had to negotiate a price for a water taxi back to Cat Bay Town. We did well to get the price halved and then shivered our way through the krasts for an hour to reach dry land on a very old wooden boat.

A satisfying day was capped off with just about the tastiest meal we have had in Vietnam and finding The Big Man Restaurant and Bar ( a portentous name) who assured us that the cup final the next day would be showing despite the 2330 kick off time. Objective 2 achieved.

The day of the final dawned cloudy but with the promise of better things to come…….

We had booked a full day cruise to go further afield in the bay and the trip included kayaking, a swim, lunch and unexpectedly, really good company from fellow travellers from Holland, Germany, Ireland, Ramsgate and Gateshead! As we cruised through one of the wonders of the natural world, there was much talk (from us) of the evening ahead with promises to meet up at The Big Man.

Every black and white fan now has their own story of where they were the day we won the cup and whilst being at Wembley with friends and family would have been the obvious number 1 choice, sitting in a bar with new friends, using the bar wifi and a VPN to pick up the ITV broadcast, in a Vietnamese bar was a pretty damn good second.

Or it was, until we lost WiFi 5 minutes into the match resulting in us enjoying the first half with local commentary. We did not need English to explain the fairy tale, Roy of the Rovers moment on 44 minutes when Big Dan Burn scored what is now my favourite ever goal. Neither did the bar staff require a translation of our ecstatic reaction.

The lateness of the hour and the fact that there were now only 4 of us left, led to us all deciding to head to our separate hotels for the second half, A quick taxi ride, picking up more beers from the hotel honesty fridge and we had Sky Sports for the culmination of a 70 year wait with many tears, dozens of texts and us finally getting to sleep shortly before 0300.

A UNESCO World Heritage Site, a wonder of the natural world, The Big Man Bar and Big Dan Burn.

16 March 2025.

Forever in our hearts.

Thank you.

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