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.