Taken for Granted

Today I lead a climbing trip, packing a myriad of gear with a fellow guide before heading out on the same boat as our kayakers. I look at the karsts with new eyes today: The little geology remaining in my brain from college, coupled with a small amount of intuition and sizable input from my coworkers, Google, Neagha (our local conservationist) and a pretty cool movie on bolting routes in Thailand tell me that the limestone karsts surrounding us were laid down over 200 million years by layer upon layer upon layer of shredded sea shell. Tectonic movement then edged the sea floor in under the limestone, buckling and shoving the rock over a kilometer and a half into the sky, where it was eventually exposed through erosion to display individual layers of deep gray rock in clear-cut angles rising from the sea. As coastal weather wore peaks down to their present heights through physical erosion, tidal sea life aided the process along the water line. Shellfish, clamped onto towers in the tidal zone, release gasses that combine with water to create a weak sulfuric acid and wear away the bottom of the towers through chemical erosion. They accelerate the erosion in process from the bay’s battering waves, undercutting the mountainous features and leaving arches, caves and tunnels. Mussel-covered pillars drop from ceilings, countering looming outcrops and rocks just below the surface. As tides rise arches disappear, waves shrouding undercut cliffs and restoring an illusion of simple islands rising from the sea. Occasionally undercut walls fall into the sea, taking with them blankets of vegetation and revealing stark new faces.

Additionally, water soaking into the rock absorbs carbon dioxide released form roots put down by jungle vegetation, forming carbonic acid that dissolves the limestone as it moves downward. When water seeps out of the sides and base of the towers and evaporates, it forms tufas and stalactites as minerals are left behind. In the meantime, hollow spaces left behind in the towers eventually collapse in on themselves, creating massive sinkholes that will eventually connect with the bay to become lagoons.

Local legend ditches all the fancy science and informs us that Once Upon a Time pirates attacked, sending the island into terror. A huge dragon descended from the sky, spewing fireballs and jewels and jade into the bay as she destroyed the invaders. Islands were raised in a maze to keep invaders at bay in the future, causing shipwrecks when attempts were made. The dragon’s children then decided to remain in the bay, living beneath the water among the towers.

Given the breathy trumpets released from the rock as waves move in to fill caves and tunnels, this legend seems almost plausible.

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Some time later we clamber from our junk boat onto a smaller tender boat from the channel’s center between a couple of smaller karsts, past an archway and onto tide-dependent oyster-covered rocks onto Moody Beach, ringed by vertical walls. A small patch of jungle divides the beach, doubling as cover for a narrow, winding bunker that hid artillery during the war. We spend the next three hours setting climbs and belaying customers, coaching them through the fear, uncertainty and unfamiliar body movement that I remember so clearly from my first days on the wall. I’m reminded daily of the trust given to us as we tie unfamiliar knots through our customers’ harnesses, threading rope through oddly shaped metal devices and instruct them, an hour after our lives intersect, to place their lives in our hands. 

The point is driven home today, especially, as I've woken to discover a friend’s death in a mountaineering accident overnight in Alaska. I’ve never dealt with death easily, and this is the first time I’ve experienced the loss of a friend my age. It’s also the first time I’ve been in this situation far from home. Even not having crossed paths with Dasan for some time, the news of his fall wrenches me. Dasan was a careful, extremely competent and experienced climber, full of passion and genuine good. He was an absolute inspiration, and I would have put my life in his hands without hesitation. I still would.

It’s so important to remember that we’re human– and to double- and triple-check everything that we do. Everyone makes mistakes. Recognizing the blind faith and confidence given to us by the vast majority of our customers is humbling.

And so I think today about the lives I hold in my own hands, and how Dasan’s passing has reminded me once again to live life to the fullest. I like to believe he’s at peace in the mountains.

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After lunch, the climbing guides normally hop on a smaller basket boat to “Castaway Island,” where Vietnam Backpackers hosts dozens of young(er) adults in a day and night, or two, or three, of continuous drinking and debauchery. We pick up a predetermined (yet most definitely susceptible to change) number of climbers, ferry them to another beach and set a different pair of routes, practicing patience and tact at their highest levels along the way. I suppose the folks who board our basket boat constitute the higher-IQ population the island, since they’ve foregone the more popular “Booze Cruise” (beer most definitely not free) to let us put them on rope and experience something a little different in life. Ergo, we find ourselves unsurprised when faced with a very hairy-chested man in a teeny tiny pink and black string bikini, holding a beer as he attempts to jump through a hula hoop on the beach.

Today, however, I’m shown clearly how quickly and fully I’ve been welcomed as family amongst Asia Outdoors and our boat crew. As I finally have a chance to begin processing the news of Dasan’s passing, taking a moment to cry on a colleague’s shoulder, the crew vehemently insist that I return to town and another staff member step into my overnight shift on the boat (we’ve got people who’ve signed up to sleep under the stars). I turn down compassionate offers from other guides on the boat and we come to a compromise, shuffling guides so I can take the afternoon for myself. Once the afternoon kayakers have been sent off, Anh Son builds me a nest in the low-ceilinged cabin above the captain’s seat and kitchen, which I’m pretty sure is his small territory on the boat. His ever-present smile touched with concern, he beckons me through the low door and insists I sleep. And so I do, waking to the kayakers’ return and able to fully enjoy the evening as we eat a feast of squid, fish, fruit, rice and spring rolls; drink whiskey and beer; sing karaoke (English songs primarily selected by the Vietnamese present, consisting of christmas carols, the YMCA and Nsync), and play cards on a floating house (above the planks that hide Bova’s ridiculously giant lucky grouper) before settling down for the night on thin pads and beneath the comforting weight of thick blankets on the top deck.

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The bay has stilled. Dogs bark in the distance, an occasional basket boat passes through the channel, and light seeps around the surrounding karsts as the junk boat rotates gently on the water’s glassy surface above our anchor.

Towers and Mazes in the Bay

My attempt to wake up late on my first day in Cat Ba fails epically. I meet a couple new coworkers at the office in the late morning, who introduce to one of the biggest perks of working for AO– using company “staff” gear to have fun on our days off. It’s a perk fully taken advantage of, since salt and humidity in the air here wears gear so quickly. The three of us make an odd bunch as we load hardware and ropes into our bags: Matty, a slender redhead from the UK with a few halfhazard dreads he usually hides under a scarf, towers over me. Mervil, Phillipino, may actually be shorter than me.

Gear assembled and loaded with bananas, rice crackers and sesame/peanut/honey bars, we pile into our go-to taxi, a small bright blue Kia hatchback driven by a guy named Huong. We take one of two or three roads out of town, twisting along the coast for a short while before turning into the island’s peaks. As we wind upward on the overgrown, single-lane street Matty indulges the Vietnamese preoccupation to tease white people in regards to our current romantic interests by reassuring Hung that, although I’m a lovely person, he’s just met me yesterday.

It’s a very welcome change from travelling in Africa– I’ll take good-natured teasing about weekly boyfriends over daily marriage proposals any time you ask.

Butterfly Valley lies in the midst of the island, a 15-minute drive from Cat Ba Town. Cliffs cloaked in jungle rise high around the circular depression. We pick our way across the valley floor, skirting rows of cabbage and lettuce farmed by the family who owns the valley. We're welcomed by the single bare wall in sight, bulging low above the valley floor and covered in hanging tufas and deep, hollow whorling pockets. 

The climbing here differs drastically from the lower angled granite and volcanic tuff I’ve played on at home: mostly either vertical or steeply overhung, providing the added challenge of stepping blindly and utilizing core and upper body strength I’ve not needed in the past to keep my body sucked into the rock. It also provides clean falls away from the rock face when my feet and hands slip; a super welcome change. I return to town in the evening totally beat and full of smiles.
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I spend my first couple weeks with Asia Outdoors shadowing trips, primarily in kayaks. We leave on a Junk Boat through Ben Beo Harbor, adjacent to a floating fishing village nestled within a slim, curving peninsula. Styrofoam blocks and sealed plastic drums support intricate frameworks of wooden planks upon which small houses are constructed. Paired planks extend outward in grids from each house, providing frameworks just wide enough to walk on. Within the grids nets are hung, creating units within each family’s individual fish farm to dump young fish and sharks and wait for them to grow and be sold. Motored and hand-powered basket boats, constructed of woven bamboo slicked over with tar, line the waterways, moored to owners’ homes. Several larger fishing boats live in the harbor as well, lights dangling from lines strung high and nets pulled in tight, before disappearing for days at a time. The village bursts with color: red, sea green and blue dominate the cove, accented with yellow, orange and white trim.

Our junk boat passes out of the harbor into Lan Ha Bay, channel markers leading us toward a cluster of karsts where a smaller tender boat waits to transfer climbers to a Moody Beach. We then move north, stopping to pick up kayaks at a house boat owned by a man named Bova. Bova is a funny man: once upon a time, we payed him a fee to store our kayaks and then rent additional kayaks as needed from his own fleet. Upon retiring a few of our kayaks for repair, we began renting more often from Bova. Now, with the addition of four new AO kayaks, he’s attempted to increase his storage fee significantly to make up for the loss of revenue from those kayaks we no longer rent from his own fleet… There’s a term I’ve been introduced to recently called Lucky Money. This is, I believe, a small example.

Kayaks in tow, we head further northeast around the island and drop anchor near the national park in a place called Ba Trai Dao, near the channel separating Lan Ha Bay from HaLong Bay further north. We climb into our authentic handmade Vietnamese kayaks– that is to say, fiberglass kayaks made from olds in Vietnam, virtually untippable and weighing around three times that of those I’m used to, demonstrating a strong tendency to veer to the right.

Over the two or three hours we wind our way through karsts, arches and lagoons. Karsts twist into a maze, overlapping and blending into each other. Flat light creates a dizzying effect on the landscape: it's impossible to tell where one tower ends and the next starts some distance behind it. Separate points may frame channels between karsts, or shallow inlets, or long, narrow inviting inlets appearing to separate karats until, after winding around multiple bends and loops, I arrive at a dead end. At first, unfamiliar with the landscape and without the sun to orient me, I feel hopelessly bewildered. After a few days in the boats I come to recognize topography by major outcrops and dips in the rock, channel markers, bright white walls, sunken boats and temples erected on beaches. Arches and caves disappear in rising tides, changing the land and seascape at water level. I'm told to disregard cruise ships I’ve come to rely upon, following sage advice from a fellow guide never to rely on anything not literally set in stone. Somehow, after accidentally taking the long way round and ending up in open sea as I mock-lead a trip, then returning to the office to consult a couple maps, everything falls into place.

We return to the junk boat for lunch, setting out food for customers before settling down to eat family style with the boat crew on the smaller tender boat. They lay out tofu, little fried jumping fish, larger fish soup, chunks of grilled fish, grilled onions and carrots, greens, fried spring rolls, pork, rice and fruit. We eat family style, circled with small individual bowls around the feast in front of us as. The crew breaks out xeo– traditionally fermented rice wine– and passes glasses around, joining in the universally practiced tradition of drinking thoroughly through the midday meal as we accept minuscule amounts to their full glasses. The crew's xeo is tame, fermented in a jar full of chopped bamboo (xeo sold in the market usually comes in vessels containing sea stars, lizards, cobras and other odd unidentifiable seat things). By the end of lunch, several cheers later, all glasses are empty.  

 Vocabulary lessons come most naturally after lunch from the boat crew as we cluster around the steering wheel, drinking tea and bullshitting. We laugh together as Ahn Hung, our Junk Boat’s captain and owner's brother, explains the difference in intonation that changes the meaning of beo from “harbor” to “fat,” or ca from “fish” to “penis.” The rest of the crew help write things out, scrawling across the back of the pad we use to tally drinks. More often than not they play a joke or two on us: last week, a thorough (and thoroughly confusing) explanation of honoraries was begun after a couple crew members pointed to our basket boat driver and instructed us to call him Cu “Baby” Bien, rather than Chu “Father” Bien. Not to be confused with Cu "Great-grandfather." 

In the afternoon we put kayaks into the water once more, slightly closer to Ben Beo Harbor. The area is more populated, adjacent to a deep, wide and more heavily-trafficked channel. Heavy ropes run from scattered individual houseboats to outcrops in the nearby karsts, securing them in
place. We wind between houses (leaving enough distance to protect ourselves from ever-present overeager guard dogs) and karsts, dipping beneath arches into lagoons. We skirt out of the way of larger junk boats and basket boats in the water. As we tell customers, "the rules in the water are exactly the same as the rules of the road: there are none." And we, in our little kayaks, are most definitely the pedestrians in this waterway. We watch as locals go about their daily lives, fishing and harvesting shellfish and setting out rows of baskets filled with sand to farm oysters on shallow shelves ringing much of the rock.

As the sun prepares to set we return our kayaks to Bova and reboard the company boat to return to Cat Ba, arriving over the hilljust in time for the crimson orb to sink behind the hills across town.

Welcome Home

My plane lands late. I breeze through customs and immigration. Airport officials are super kind– a woman in uniform approaches to point out free trolleys as I struggle with my gear, and stands watch over my bags as I retrieve one. I’m so glad that Thanh, an Asia Outdoors staff member, has come to meet me at the airport, since I’ve arrived too late to catch the last bus of the day toward the island. Instead of cluelessly catching a cab to the hostel district and attempting to locate a place to stay, Thanh takes me to a friends place where we drop my bags, I get a shower and we dip around the corner for a meal before I return and crash for a couple hours. We then head to a health center where I pay $15, including tip, for multiple mineral baths, an epic massage, ginger tea and soup, taking the edge off my 30+ hour journey.

The minute I step into Vietnam my lifelong Kosher diet flies out the window. It’ll be hard enough to avoid wheat, dairy, eggs and soy due to allergies while I’m here. Over the past few years I’ve realized that, although I’ve kept to Kosher foods by habit after being raised in a practicing Jewish household, Judaism in my life has long been more about culture and identity than about literal belief and practice. Eating pork and shellfish doesn’t change who I am, how I grew up, who loves me, where I come from or what I believe. Ergo, when my hosts take me around the corner to a café that serves soup with pork balls, rice noodles and salad for my first meal in the country, I eat without worry.

Seeing whole roasted dog on a spit sold on the side of the street, however, will take some getting used to.

Roads are, for lack of better words, a free-for-all. On split highways, people usually drive in the right direction. Motorists obey signals in the few places they exist, although traffic resumes moving well before green lights appear. On the vast majority of streets, busses, motorbikes and a highly disproportionate number of Mercedes and Lexus disregard speed limits and lanes, winding around each other and honking pell-mell as they slow, twist and speed around cross-traffic in major intersections. As we wander down the street, Thanh instructs me to just keep walking– cars and motorbikes will miss me. If a bus comes up behind me though, I should probably take a step or two out of the way.

Saturday we take a bus from Hanoi to the coastal city of Hai Phong, travelling through rice fields interspersed with sprawling buildings probably housing various production factories. A cab whose driver assumes I’m Thanh’s wife transfers us to a harbor street where shops, cafes and booking booths back the river, separated from massive cranes by slim, single-story concrete walls.

The speedboat we catch takes us outward from the muddy waters of the river’s mouth, weaving between tankers and buoys toward Cat Ba. The island rises green from the sea, erratic, jagged peaks and valleys cloaked in trees and vines that spill down over limestone outcrops banded in black and white. Jungle-topped limestone karsts rear up from the ocean, sheer cliffs glowing golden in the afternoon sun as we round the south side of Cat Ba. And so we pull into the harbor, offload gear and make our way through a giant orange concrete arch. We cross the town’s brightly-colored hotel-lined waterfront main street and enter the first building we come to. We climb to the second floor where I flop down onto a sprawling woven box top full of beanbags in the office of Asia Outdoors, and I say hello to my new workplace.

Shortly thereafter, I sleep really, really well.