Day 225 - Cruising Cat Ba by motorbike

After joining Lars and Anya for breakfast at our 'local' we all set for our day on the motorbikes exploring the island. The day started with us immediately making a wrong turn, but after chatting to the locals we were soon on the right track and managed to stay on it all day - which isn't too hard considering the island only has 2 main roads!!! Our first stop of the day was Hospital Cave - this cave was used as a secret and bomb proof hospital during the American War (as the Vietnam War is known as here) by the Viet Cong. The cave was a surreal experience - as we wandered through the concrete bunker rooms where staff and patients lived between 1962-1965 our minds turned to what it would have been like to live here during the war. Although it is basic by all standards the Vietnamese managed to build a 'cinema' and 'swimming pool' within the mineral encrusted rocky cave. We were treated to a wonderful song "Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh" by our young guide, which echoed off the walls of the cave.

Reluctantly leaving the cave, we motored away to the coast, stopping to climb a hill to get a view out to the ocean. After only 45 minutes of driving over a winding, cliff side road that dived in and out of villages nestled amongst the wetlands, we made it to the end of the road - literally!! We backtracked our way to one of the small villages in a search of cheap, good food, and while it was cheap, the serving size and flavour left much to be desired - one good thing about the stop was that Adam got to be totally defeated in a rule-less game of "pool" with some local kids.
After lunch we took a different road back around another section of the coast which eventually led us back into the mountains. We crawled through a local village where the local kids called out hellos and extended their hands to give us 'high-fives' as we went by.

We continued our motorised cruise and soon found ourselves back in Cat Ba town, where we had a break from riding and walked through the local fish markets and ended up at our local for the girls to warm up with hot drinks. Our final stop for the day was to visit Cat Ba's 3 beaches, which were beautiful, but in a very untropical climate we decided against a swim and took an off roading adventure between the beaches instead. This allowed us to conquer all the roads the run through the island and also gave Adam and relatively traffic and stress-free introduction to motorbiking around Vietnam.

Back in town we ate and packed for our trip from Cat Ba to Ninh Binh tomorrow.

Adlibing the Cat Ba roads.