Factual Errors & The Loss Of A Friend
Trip Start
Dec 01, 2008
1
48
80
Trip End
Jun 01, 2009
Halong Bay, Vietnam
Sunday, March 29, 2009
So once again I have done the total opposite and that is why I am standing on the top deck of a large, fairly luxurious boat doing what must be the single most touristy thing you can do in the whole of South East Asia. An overnight cruise round Halong Bay. I am in a room with Rachelle from Canadia, and some Vietnamese bloke whose name I cannot remember. On the trip down past emerald paddys and jade mountains, I had got to know Rachelle, Kylie and Simon from Australia and Jo and Garath from Guernsey and New Zealandshire respectively. The shipping docks were like a giant floating city of wooden ships, some with sails, some without, all setup for the tourist cruise and ready to serve seafood for every meal and overpriced beers, $2, daylight robbery. Across the bay, the giant limestone peaks and mountains lorded over us as we sat on the top deck and took in the Sun, they seemed to be massive dragon fins, like the dorsal plates of some gargantuan prehistoric creature, just below the surface of the water. Shark fins, peaks and troughs. Legend has it that a giant dragon crashed into the Earth here, that's why the land was torn into the these dramatic jagged arrow heads that penetrate the surface from below.
I am totally fucking sick of caves. It would have to have something really special to make me choose to visit one, but this trip has a visit to one included so here we go again. It is an impressive cave, sure, much larger and cavernous then any I have previously been in, it, along with Halong Bay itself, are UNESCO world heritage sites, so that's another two for my collection then. There are several formations here that form recognisable shapes. A crocodile, a turtle, a human penis, and some dangling legs and feet. Lovely and that, but you had to shuffle around it like you were in shackles for a crime you didn't commit, due to the weight of the UNSECO world heritage human traffic that waddled with me. Tourist after tourist after shipload of tourists. Pretty depressing really, I basically speed walked away from my group to get out of there, took some nice unimaginative photos, and got back on the boat ASAP. There were some great views from the exit of the cave which was about 50m above the water surface, like a pirate cove, Tortuga bay, all the luxury junk boats with their triangle sails up, looking like pirate ships me 'hearty's, scallywags and mutineers, one eyed salesmen and little row boats full of snacks and beers and bottles of wine, shells, trinkets, all looking to get their share of the bounty, the doubloons and the pieces of eight. Soon after we got out the cave we did a bit of Kayaking around the bay. Since nearly dieing in Rishikesh I had gone of the idea of kayaking, but these were sea kayaks, not white water kayaks, very different indeed, you are not tight tucked into them with a lycra skirt holding you in. They are more like canoes with seats for two people rather than one. I was partnered with Rachelle, as the other 4 were 2 sets of couples, and after putting a basic life vest on (for some reason mine was the only on with a collar, and a pink zip) we hit the water in perfect synchronicity, paddling together like an Olympic kayaking duo. We laughed as we watched other couples struggle to paddle in the same direction let alone synchronize, and one girl that took her whole sparkle blue handbag in the kayak with her and wore posh jeans. Perfect for a day in the water. We zoomed off round the bay, around the floating landings, always turning slightly to the right, we were both right handed, but I thought this would send us left if we worked the right harder? Maybe we were both aware of this, and unconsciously compensated on the left side, anyhow, it was a spectacular day, the sun shone hard and I was glad to have a hat on, the hat that has kept my follicly challenged bonce safe from the harmful rays of our nearest star since I started traveling, and for several years before that, it has seen me through music festivals, Cambridge summers, Christ Pieces chill outs after working to hard at Strawberry Fairs, its been the closest thing I have to hair so several years and....... "RACHELLE!! MY HAT HAS FALLEN OFF!! ABOUT TURN! ABOUT TURN!" Shit, a small breeze has just slipped my hat of off the back of my head and into the drink, turn my head, no problem, it's floating. Turning isn't a very easy procedure, If you want to turn all the way about, as we did (she was laughing as we did this), I, as the person at the rear of the Kayak, has to stab my paddle into the water to suddenly slow us and create a lot of drag, Rachelle at the front paddles just on one side, we turn on a lose axis with my paddle as the fulcrum. I look back; clock the hat in the sunlight, 5ish, sun is heading towards the ocean, golden strip of light illuminates the way, mentally tag the position of the hat in comparison to the immediate environment, and the horizon landmarks. "FASTER RACHELLE! SHE'S TAKING ON WATER!" It is material, 100% cotton, and 14 English pounds worth of Billabong Festival hat, as I have come to endearingly refer to it, it will become waterlogged and sink unless we hurry.... Final turning movements (its quite hard work), crane my neck to try and remember where I had mentally clocked it at.... It's gone, we have shifted position and I am slightly disorientated, I can't see it, maybe the Sunlight is blocking my view if it, Rachelle cannot see it either... Paddle in the general direction of the man overboard, I can't see it. "Is it just below the surface?" Rachelle asks, "Are you going to dive in after it?" No. No I am not going to dive in after it Rachelle. It has gone, a loss to the Ocean, the depths have claimed what was once mine and true, lost to Davy Jones locker for all time, not to see the shore again for 10 years after the credits roll....
I am pissed off big time. That was the traveling hat, a piece of me has drowned in the crushing blackness, Neptune and Poseidon can spend the rest of time fighting over who gets it and who is the truly classic God of the Seas from ancient myth. We keep paddling, I row away from the scene of the crime and feel cleansed. Perhaps this is a new beginning? There are a million other hats out there, plenty more fish in the sea, and now one more hat as well. I saw some pretty cool hats for sale in Hanoi, maybe its time to leave style behind and embrace the ludicrous...... No sooner than we had got round a large cliff face, we noticed a strange mist in the distance, or was it fog? I actually felt it was more like smoke, but I was informed that this was not correct, I will call it 'Smistog'. The Smistog rolled over the Limestone peaks, and tumbled down towards us, it was moving at an unnatural pace, faster than clouds, it moved like dry ice, in the distance I could see it palming a giant sharks fin, coming round the backside, and bubbling across the top. It came at us from the distance, I was convinced something was on fire over the hills and far away, but in the end I think it was just smistog. We paddled back towards the 'Waterworld' style landing to dump the Kayak and get back on the boat for showers and dinner. But on the way we had to use our combined strength and ability to panic slightly, as we tried to take a shortcut round another landing, via a massive Junk boat, that suddenly started reversing towards us, we were but 8 metres away from her Aft at this time. Collective "Shit! hard to Port!", and we paddled just to the side as it heaved past us.
Is there anyone reading this that DOESN'T know that a Squid and an Octopus are different animals? Didn't think so, but there were two people at our dinner table that only discovered that fact today. Jo and Rachelle, I scolded them for their ignorance, and was left even more aghast and agog as Jo proceeded to tell a story concerning the Yorkshire Ripper (I won't go into it here) and turned to me as the only other English at the table for a bit of supplementary material on Jack the Ripper. "Rory, Jack the Ripper, that was the 13th century wasn't it?" "...................." Silence and stunned 'you cannot be serious' face on. Factual errors on a scale I have not witnessed since Jade Goody said that "East Anglia was abroad", God rest her glossy gossip column soul. Simon started some karaoke, and like the crowd waiting for the first person to start dancing before getting down with the funky chicken themselves, everyone leapt up with their rendition of Lady in Red etc. And saved the evening from ending to soon. Whilst this was going on, I moved outside with a few others and started trying to fish for squid in the warm dark of the night, using a thin length of bamboo, with some fishing wire attached at one end, and a grappling hook style quad prong lure at the end, we sat, meditative at the aft of the ship, legs dangling over the edge above a single light that sat a foot above the surface. We talked about Australia and the regional differences and the regional beers, and how the phrase "Put another shrimp on the barbie!" was from a tourism campaign in America years ago, its not accurate because Australians would say 'Prawn', But Americans don't know what a Prawn is, because they are ignorant. We drank overpriced beers, and wished there was some way of getting cheaper ones whilst we fished. We must have sat in the still night as person after person went to bed leaving just myself and Simon and this bloke from Bedford called Dave whose birthday it now was as the clock had just struck 12.... We both sang 'Happy Birthday' to him, then, at the stroke of genius, a snack boat came rowing out of the darkness of the silent bay, full of treats, cold beers (that cost less than a third of the price of the ones on board for the same size can of the same brand) like a mind reading Vietnamese life saver, they just knew. A young girl and her mate, no lights, just suddenly rowed into the light coming from the back of the boat, there wasn't another ship for hundreds of metres, you could see the lights at the base of the mountains all around us, the snack boats must swarm round them like knowing moths round corner shop lamps. We got a load of beer and kept on fishing. I have never fished in my life, but I can see the appeal of it now, like I said, meditative, calming, its like a Zen art form to free the mind of conscious noise. Below our feet the light had attracted many a species of small fish, they swarm in species specific circles at varying speeds and of varying sizes around the light, that overlapped in places like a piscine Venn diagram. They were all different colours, enhanced brilliant by the light, there were a couple of dark green types, a slightly larger brown one, the squids had some bioluminescence which is always nice, they moved against the crowd and slightly lower. The most mesmerizing though were the flying fish, water dragons, turquoise in colour, with large fins that look like wings (what an original description), trailing by their sides. Occasionally our lures would get a bit too close for comfort and they would jump or 'fly' out of the water to elude a spearing. A pipefish here, a cuttlefish there.
Simon eventually sloped of to bed and I hit the top deck with a beer in the midst of the massive misty mountains. The smistog that creped in earlier now sat around the dorsal fins lit up by the lights of the junks that sat at the base. I stared out over the reflections in the glutinous shifting mirror of Tonkin. The perfect symmetry of the tower karsts in the bay made my think of epic sound waves as portrayed on a computer screen, the stereo image either side of the surface, amplitude of both channels displayed against the glowing sky and the deep dimension of the gulf below.
I ran my head 'Halong' the giant sonic horizon and imagined impossible timbres until it was time for bed.
