Lying with a smile....

The hoax. 

Every time any one travels, it doesn't matter who you are, there's a moment where you either get majorly ripped off (not talking cents but sometimes hundreds/thousands of dollars) or in our case today, being told one thing ...specific information that's critically time and distance sensitive that can make or break important scheduled/planned events in a vacation.

The bus company reccommended in all the guide books shows scheduling on their website for 4 different departure times every day to Kat Ba Island from Hanoi. So we spent the morning sight seeing and when we got to the bus station (far from the main part of town, as often is the case) they had a sign up right in front of us. There are only two scheduled times early in the morning and we had missed them)....but according to the bus guy, he wrote out a more expensive play by play plan of local bus/taxi/speed boat that would get us there that after noon....as long as we got to the speed boat terminal by 5pm. 

We decided to try. We are on a tight schedule with R man heading home next week and every minute counts. 

The bus that is scheduled to take 2 hours to go 60km took 3 1/2 hours due to dropping and picking up every customer at their specified intersection, getting reviewed by 4 different bosses, and apparently doubling as a fed ex truck. We got a taxi driver who played the fool and when we finally made it to the boat dock at 4:30pm, the last scheduled expensive boat had left 30 minutes prior..he had specifically instructed that the last boat leaves at 5pm, giving us hope and worry thru the entire grueling trip.....what a pain. 

All in all it was heart breaking to be left in an empty street surrounded by scam artists rubbing it in our faces that we didn't make it, a taxi driver who just shrugged and drove off and a feeling of "shit, sometimes you just can't win". Of course we never would have made the choice to travel to this place the way we did for double the price at all had we known the outcome of spending the night in Hai Phong. 

But these situations you make lemonade with right?!?  I checked us into the....well...it's crappy and expensive for Vietnam standards/compared to the heaven that was Little Hanoi Diamond in Hanoi....the motel 6 or red roof inn equivalent of Vietnam a block from the port.  Then we ate a delicious bowl of noodles (the closest we've had to pad Thai here, but with a serious awesome twist, accompanied by little bowls of wontons in chicken broth and pints of beer.  The great thing about visiting a smallerish town with no UNESCO world heritage sights? No tourists.  People smiled and said hello in the streets. We wandered thru street stalls selling wine/beer/bright red sparkly things and dried fruits all tied and wrapped together in gift baskets for Vietnamese New Year.  The bill for the delicious meal came to a whopping $3.50!  Our crap hotel?   Only $25. We ended up loving the walk thru the streets of this pier side neighborly community passing over 100 coffee shops in a 1 mile radius watching friends sit together sipping caffeine on the streets in the dark.