We were very lucky on our last day to be given some advice from our favourite dinner guy “Little Man” to walk up to the helicopter landing pad from WW2. Apart from it being a grey day, it turned out one of the best things we done in our entire 2.5 weeks here. We had extensive views over Lan Ha, Ha Long and Cat Ba bays which was so beautiful!
It made us comment to each other yet again about how there seems to be Vietnam, and then Vietnam which the locals think the tourists want to see. This particular walk is only about 30 minutes from the centre of town and is totally spectacular, but it’s not advertised anywhere at all! We only found out because Little Man had walked up there himself and recommended it, which is crazy since it’s pretty much the coolest thing we’ve done on the island (apart from the Ha Long cruise).
The same goes for food. Every day we see Vietnamese eating amazing looking foods, with many vegetables and fish, but you just cannot order that stuff on menus. They have a very limited range of Vietnamese food that some powers that be must have decided foreigners would like and it is very much foreigner food. In light of that, we were estatic when Mr Tuan, our hotel manager invited us to dinner with him and the hotel owner for our last night, since we had already stayed with them for 18 nights so they wanted us to have a farewell dinner. Real food! How exciting. In every place we’ve been in Vietnam there are always a few people in town that go out of their way for tourists and try to make up for all the other people who are unfortunately doing their best at scamming tourists. Mr Tuan is definitely one of them and we have been so lucky to stay with him and have him look after us. When we arrived for dinner, which was an awesome, delicious fresh fish and vegetable hot pot, Mr Tuan also brought out a bottle of french wine for us. We were pretty pleased about this, and then when it progressed onto honey liquer shots we just went along with it. Before we knew it we were all having a great time and lets just say the restaurant was very vocal with the four of us laughing and talking. It was a really good night and made us feel good about having been on Cat Ba for so long. Vietnam really does have some amazing people and the views here are definitely worth seeing in everyones lifetime! Our photos of our last day in Cat Ba are here.