Celebrations and goodbyes fill my last two weeks on Cat Ba. Manh, the departing manager of the restaurant below the Asia Outdoors office, lays one of the most beautiful seafood spreads in history in front of us on his floating restaurant. Naturally, we end up climbing (in some cases, hanging from) the rafters far into the night. I take a final trip to climb at The Face, that gently arcing diamond wall set solo in a less-traveled channel in Ha Long Bay proper. On Christmas, the company gathers for a holiday lunch on our boat in the bay, then later sits down to a proper formal-ish dinner (the girls dress up, at least).
On my last day off I take a basket boat with my friend Nate to climb a slender, twisting, razor-sharp spire known as "The Corkscrew" and its topsy-turvy cousin with a comically tiny base "The Chopstick." Gaining the spire in low tide involves a solid boulder move after climbing from the foam lifering stashed all the way on top of the boat's tarp-and-bamboo canopy, with a little balancing help from Chu Bien- the gentlest, happiest man I've ever met. I say goodbye to the bay from vertigo-inducing viewpoints far above the water around me.
Throughout the week, rice wine (vodka) flows like a river-- or several of them, dispersed from massive petrol containers to soup bowls from which we refill our shot glasses dozens of times through the night. "Rice soup," they call it.On January 1st I board a bus, and a boat, and a bus, and another bus, and finally a motorbike taxi in my final journey from Cat Ba Island to Hanoi. My parents arrive tomorrow from the States and we'll travel Vietnam for a month, and then it'll be time to move on.
