Cat Ba Island and Viet Hai Village
Cat Ba Island in Haiphong City, Vietnam, it takes more than four hours to get there from Hanoi. When we arrived, the island’s beach were crowded with people, perhaps Vietnamese on a group holiday.
Because it was about six o’clock in the afternoon when we arrived, we just walked around the island a few times, ate something, and went back to bed.
The next day, we booked a guest house in a village called Viet Hai. It takes a ferry to get there from Cat Ba Island, and there are only two ferries to and from each day, at 11 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., with a price of 50k VND, which takes about an hour.
Viet Hai is a small village with only one main road and about 300 villagers. The village is largely self-sufficient in economy, and vegetables need to be brought in from the town of Cat Ba. It’s a particularly quiet little village, full of greens, you can hear the birds, you can see goats grazing on the side of the road, and perhaps from time to time you need to get rid of the little bugs in your clothes.
The goods in the village are not cheap, a bottle of water and a cooked noodles cost about the same. The water on the island is desalinated and always salty.
Our guest house offers free breakfast and a paid dinner. There were five dishes for dinner, with fried fish nuggets, omelettes, sweet potato balls, wild vegetable soup and fried cabbage. Because I’m tired of all kinds of bread, these simple dishes were really delicious to me.
Back to the town of Cat Ba, we rented a small motorcycle, intended to drive to Cat Ba National Park , it is not very far away, the scenery along the way is also very good.
Forest Park tickets are not expensive, 80k VND a person. Climbing is not too difficult, the conductor said it will take more than an hour to reach the top of the mountain. Along the way the trees are dense, the sun is not strong, but there are many mosquitoes.
There are a lot of vegetarian restaurants here, and the price is very good.
Cat Ba Island is not small, you can rent a motorcycle to hang around. There are sea and mountains, where you can hike, kayak, explore caves, and much more.
