After our horrible tour on the way over, I swore I was done with tours. Done! After the bus finally dropped us off at the hostel, we wandered out to get some pho. After getting some warm food in our tired bodies we perked up a little bit and started chatting with some guys sitting in the restaurant.
They had been on Cat Ba Island for a few days and gave us some great advice. One of the things they said is that they did a really great hiking tour. I was incredibly hesitant to ask more questions about it until one of them mentioned puppies. Puppies?! Tell me more. Apparently the hike went to a village that was full of puppies.
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| Halong Bay |
I signed up for the hike. But not until taking a day to explore the town on my own. Cat Ba Island is in the low season right now since it's not warm. It meant empty restaurants and deserted streets. Odd, but relaxing.
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| View from the hill |
I woke up without an alarm, and since the hostel had the fastest internet of anywhere in Vietnam, I spent the morning chatting with some people from home. I have had a couple of backpackers make remarks to me about "you really should just disconnect from all of that" or "well they need to understand that you're out traveling and shouldn't be making time for that." Hrmph. I disagree. I happen to enjoy talking to people from back home once in a while. Sheesh. Traveling to some extent is about going off on your own, but I don't think that has to come at the expense of my relationship with those back home.
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| Hey look! A flag! |
Anywho. After lots of talking and a couple cups of coffee, Cheyenne and I decided to head down to the waterfront for lunch. We kept seeing this hotpot thing on the menu, and it was pretty expensive. I figured it was just a big seafood soup so we decided to treat ourselves since we were having such a chill day. Turns out its much more elaborate than that. We were clued in when the waiter brought out our own gas burner. Then a plate of veggies. And a plate of noodles. And a different kind of noodles. And a big pot of broth which he brought to a boil on our burner. Then he came back with a big plate of seafood. We had to ask him what to do. He explained to us how long to cook everything and tossed the first couple shrimps in. Once again, it was a seafood meal that took us a couple hours to eat, but it was so good!
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| Yummmm |
After lunch we wandered around a path that took us up to look at the bay and back around to another side of the island.
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| Beach! |
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| Looking at the view |
The hiking tour was everything that I had hoped for. Just Cheyenne, the guide and I hiked through the forest for about 10km before we came to Viet Hai, the village of puppies. Sure enough, the first house we saw had a momma dog and TINY fluffballs running around. After making friends with the momma dog, we spent a decent amount of time petting and photographing the little dogs while the guide waited. Little did we realize that as we walked along the road, we would see about five or six more litters of puppies. We stopped to pet all of them of course.
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| Frog lake! |
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| The trail! |
After an amazing lunch, we walked another 3(ish)km to the water and took a boat back to our hotel. Such a successful day.
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| Our guide and the boat driver |
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| On the way our guide stopped to buy some pork. |
