halong bay (vietnam), here i come

A mini-bus to the dock was included in my price paid for the next three days so I had to get my things together and check out before 10:00 a.m. as the mini-bus was to be there shortly after. Mustache bid me a farewell, having taken me for quite a bit of dough, and said I could stay at his hotel anytime if I ever came back through, for the regular rate, of course, but it was nice of him to offer to let me pay him to stay in his hotel.
As always, the mini-bus was ultra-late, leaving me waiting around for the better part of 30 minutes, in which time I could have walked to the dock, but that wasn’t the point. When I finally arrived at said dock, my false illusion of a tourist-free journey was fantastically obliterated as the dock was filled with Mickey Mouse visors, walking sticks, the token college graduates, and a wide array of fanny packs. I stood completely perplexed for a moment trying to figure out where the hell all of these people came from. They certainly weren’t there the night before, so I can only assume they shipped them in by the bus full that morning; they probably bought a combo pack from Hanoi all the way up to Halong City then out to Cat Ba and back, essentially cutting out the godforsaken bus ride I took. Part of Mustache’s sales pitch was that the boat I was going on would be less crowded than the average boat taking people out, so I was concerned for several moments that I was played and was going to be packed like sardines on one of the ships.
Finding my boat didn’t come easy, but I made it happen and hopped aboard. I was rushed from the mini-bus, rushed through the crowd and thrown onto the dock, told that I needed to find my boat as quickly as possible because it was in a huge hurry, then, staying true to form, once I got on the boat, I sat for nearly an hour with my twelve new two day friends, all of whom turned out to be pretty cool. Luck was certainly on my side with respect to my travel mates, I could have ended up with some serious assholes, but there was an Australian family of four, two daughters, the nicest woman available serving as mother/wife and a pretty young, but trying really hard to be even younger man acting as father/husband and they were doing three months together, the first month of which was spent entirely in India, which is very impressive. Next there were two Aussie girls in their early 30s, a Vietnamese expatriate living in Paris and a fellow ex-pat who fled Belgium for Kuala Lempur, Malaysia; he was 29. There was also a younger French couple, but hardly worth a mention, I mean, they were French, after all.
The boat ride was to be four hours today, then we would drop anchor and hang out, do some swimming, kayaking, eating, etc., spend the night, then do another couple hours in the morning to Cat Ba Island. The boat was made up of three floors and was a nice boat for floating off the northeast coast of Vietnam. The first floor is where all of the rooms were located, there were probably twelve to fourteen of them, and were surprisingly nice, much nicer than a lot of the rooms I’d stayed in on land, the second floor was the dining/chill/karaoke room, and the roof was a roof, from which I had every intention of jumping later on in the day. There was also a massive yellow dragon hanging off the front of the boat, much like I envision the pirate ships of hold having a mermaid cruising on the front.
Lunch was ready to be served before we even left the dock, and I opted to sit with the Aussie family for whatever reason. The older daughter was incredibly cute, and we hit it off really well, joking with one another, flirting, etc., so when I sat with her parents for lunch it felt like I was being brought home to meet the family for the first time, it was super bizarre. Mom and dad were totally giving me the third degree, asking me far more personal questions than normal for meeting a fellow traveler, they were incredibly nice, but very inquisitive, and they kept referring to their daughter, Georgia, as though she wasn’t there, telling me how well she does in school, about extracurricular activities, places she’s been, and how popular she is, which is a type of conversation I imagine taking place when a young man is auditioning for a set of parents’ daughter. I was eating it up, they were all quite likable, especially the daughter, and then, it came out that she was fifteen and my jaw must have hit the ground before I regained my composure, they had to have noticed. At that point I made a concerted effort to change the direction of the conversation towards the parents and abruptly stopped any and all cute talk going on between me and Georgia, the fifteen-year-old girl I would have put closer to 22 or 23. The lunch was good though.