16.03 Day 61 Trang An
Saturday 16th March - Trang An (Ninh Binh) (Day 61)
One of the concerns of riding an overnight bus, beyond just our safety, was our sanity due to the amount of beeping and hooting from all the road vehicles. Thankfully on these midnight roads it’s not as prevalent and I get 5 hours sleep to 02:30.
When our bus is supposed to arrive is a bit of a mystery - the three drivers / workers, although they were pleased to see Sienna and Seb boarding, high-5’s given, are not tour guides, so we think somewhere between 3-4am, leaving me checking the blue dot on google maps as we thunder through sleepy early morning villages and towns.
Around 03:30 one of the drivers tells us to get ready and we 4, plus 2 German backpackers hop off leaving the bus to continue north to Hanoi, about 100 kms away. A couple of fake taxis are waiting hopefully and after a few minutes stand off we get a lift to The ViewPoint Homestay in Trang An, a small village just outside the larger centres of Ninh Binh and Tam Coc.
We’d pre-arranged the day before with the owner to be able to access our room and indeed the property, at this ungodly hour for which we’d paid a little extra but was so worth it as we all collapsed in our full size beds and slept for another 4-5 hours.
At 9am we wake and open the curtains to a similar view as Phong Nha - large rock karsts emerging abruptly out of the ground, the tops covered in low lying mist. After a thorough introduction from Jake, the friendly Korean owner, we borrowed two of the bikes to explore. Several nearby areas are UNESCO sites, so the small village of Trang An has several homestays for those who want to access these sites but without too much commercialism found in Tam Coc.
We lucky dip picked a riverside restaurant, the only customers at 10:30 with an unlikely order of egg fried rice, fried tofu, mango smoothie and coffee. But it all goes down well.
In no rush to visit the mountain top or river cruise, in part because of the mist obscuring far off views we find ourselves at Rosie’s Gara Cafe playing games of Spot It, Jenga, chess and practising golf putting (using only the drivers they have available). Several other wet travellers join the fray, and the poncho wearing scooter drivers indicate we’re in the right spot for now.
Depending upon if the last meal was 2nd breakfast or 1st lunch we tuck into a 1st or 2nd lunch - and after are given free bananas for dessert. Which is only significant (and even that’s questionable) after eating the bananas from Dat from Green Homestay in Phong Nha for breakfast combined with banana bread from the Phong Nha bakery. And there were four more bananas given after our last meal too. Plenty of vitamin D.
The drizzle doesn’t appear to be abating, so rather than exploring more we retreat back to The ViewPoint Homestay, where Kate and the kids settle down to watch Chicken Run (after battling YouTube in Vietnamese on the TV - and yes Kate knows we could have easily watched something on the iPad, but viewing a larger screen that’s not in your face was worth the battle).
I try and wade through a myriad of options for cruises in Halong Bay - or rather Bai Tu Long Bay next door. With so many boats, tours, operators, not to mention countless reviews of people not getting what they expected it feels like the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and we’re trying to pick the Holy Grail. So long as the old man in the corner doesn’t say “He chose poorly” and my face melts, I think we’ll have done OK.
For dinner we cycle the 2 minutes to the river to restaurant Montana to try their rice bowls. I take a punt of goose breast - you’re never quite sure if the translation is accurate - and I’m afraid to say it was goose and I’m afraid to say it was delicious. All of us tried it and all four agreed we’d order it next time. Sorry goose.