Day 5 My Mid-Life Crisis in Ha Long Bay

It’s ten past six in the morning, an hour at which my brain has yet to mail me a pardon for last night’s activities. In a noble, if likely doomed, attempt to report on events *before* my memory wipes the tapes clean, I’m testing a new strategy: write about the day, go out, jot down notes on the ensuing chaos, then try to assemble a coherent narrative at an ungodly hour. So, as I await my chariot to Ha Long Bay, let’s talk about last night.

I paid a visit to the famous Beer Street—less a single street, it turns out, and more a tangled, thrumming web of back alleys that have fused into one glorious entity. It was wall-to-wall people, the sort of crowd where you could be gently relieved of your wallet and not notice for three business days. My dinner companion later informed me with the quiet confidence of a local that the primary culprits aren't even Vietnamese, but Filipino gangs. File that under 'unsettlingly specific travel tips'.

I have never seen so many bars packed into one district. A man was doing a roaring trade, wandering with a massive boombox and offering karaoke for tips. He couldn’t sing for toffee, but his secret weapon was one gentleman—I suspect Australian, and looking as if he'd personally consumed the contents of a small brewery—whose rendition of 'My Way' had the entire street in stitches. I have no idea how his voice physically produced some of those notes, but it was a truly heroic attempt.

For dinner, I ordered what I believed to be tempura prawns. What arrived was a basket of... well, prawns, technically. But these were enormous, head-to-toe battered Goliaths. Fully armoured. Armed only with chopsticks, a tool with which I have only a passing acquaintance, it was a serious challenge. After decapitating one, I attempted to pull the tail off, only for the entire batter shell to slough off in one humiliating piece, leaving a naked, slightly embarrassed-looking prawn behind. After a brief, undignified struggle, I got the hang of it. They were, it must be said, absolutely gorgeous.

The price for this kilo of magnificent, if belligerent, crustaceans? 200,000 dong, or about six quid. You couldn’t buy a single, sad, refrigerated prawn for that back home. My taxi ride there was 97 pence. I have thoughts that cost more than that. How these places turn a profit is an economic mystery that will keep me up at night. Well, not *this* night. I have a bay to get to.

The grand finale for the evening was a Grab scooter back to my hotel. Yes, this intrepid man of occasional stupidities entrusted his life to a kamikaze pilot for a fifteen-minute ride that cost all of forty-two pence. It was on this journey that I made a profound discovery: adrenaline is, in fact, brown. My driver kept insisting I wear a helmet, but I saw no reason to ruin my lovely hair. Feeling the breeze as we reached the dizzying speed of twelve miles per hour was sublime. My attempts to upload video evidence of this have failed, so you'll just have to trust me. Do yourself a favour when you visit: take a scooter, just once. I’m never doing it again. (Unless I have to get to the airport with a 25-kilo suitcase, a scenario for which a scooter may be sub-optimal.)

Speaking of journeys, I’m now on the highway to Ha Long Bay. I was promised chaos and mayhem. Instead, I get this: a sedate, three-lane motorway. Honestly, the disappointment is crushing.

A housekeeping note. Yesterday, I made a deliberate error to see who was paying attention. Nobody bit. The mistake was claiming *The Man with the Golden Gun* was filmed in Ha Long Bay; it was, as I'm reliably informed, on a Thai island. Let’s try to keep up at the back, please.

Now, to be brutally honest, I had certain expectations for this trip. I imagined my six days in Hanoi would be four days of interesting-but-calm ventures, followed by a two-day crescendo of classic excitement in Ninh Binh and Ha Long Bay. The exact opposite has occurred. The main events were, to put it mildly, underwhelming, mainly due to the five or six hours in a vehicle required to get to them, followed by a long lunch and a couple of hours of seriously crowded activities.

On my Ha Long Bay cruise, I was playing the role of Billy-No-Mates, the lone Brit among groups of Japanese and Indian tourists. The only other person I heard speaking English was an American octogenarian propped up in a corner, looking rather sad. I gave him a nod. He acknowledged me, asking if I was ex-military and making a pilgrimage to 'revisit the scene of the atrocities'.

Apparently, the old timer thought I was as old as him. My ego has seldom been so thoroughly deflated. I hadn't even entered puberty when the Vietnam War ended; my most vicious campaigns at the time were fought over the TV remote. He must have mistaken my weary, end-of-trip face for that of a grizzled combat veteran. I might need to get more sleep.

I did manage to get in and out of a kayak with minimal fuss, but I was so afraid of dropping my camera in the drink that I couldn't get as many pictures as I wanted. So, a sad 4 out of 10 for Ha Long Bay from me, and the same for Ninh Binh on all fronts. Let's hope my last night on Monday is as good as I think it might be. Sorry to be a downer, but I'm just keeping it real, folks.