Advertisement for a Guest House. . .and some other stuff

Written from Hanoi, November 15, 2018
I've never written an advertisement for a hotel before, so this will be a first.  H'mm, where to begin?  I was just the past two days out toward Halong Bay, with a stop over night in Uong Bi, a visit to the boatyard out beyond Quang Yen town, and then on to Halong City for a second night away from Hanoi.  Or, to put it another way, I made my standard shake-down ride, from here to Halong and back again, with very little on the agenda but to exercise the little horse (and find out she has crud in her gas tank and that got stuck in her low speed carburetor jet and her battery just wouldn't come back from the long sleep). . .so we exercised the horse and found out those things, which weren't too bad, compared to a ruined clutch last trip.  But I suppose I'd best tell the story more or less as it happened, and get to the hotel in due course.
It was raining in Hanoi three mornings back.  I got out of bed, halfway wanting to be on the road, but the water running in the street and the dark sky somehow failed to get me moving.  Mind you, I did buy the new rain cape and have last trip's new rain suit complete with the camouflage colored plastic boots (that actually fit!!) and I really have very little to fear from warm rain other than that the road might be a little slippery in places and if there's mud on the pavement we might get pretty dirty. But to leave a comfortable room surrounded by friends and excellent noodle shops and the finest bakery I've found on this continent. . .to leave all that to go riding in the rain just didn't suit, so I ate a nice breakfast (egg sandwich, with cucumber and mixed herbs and a little too much salt, but I like salt after all). , ,and drank tea and coffee and wandered back to read a little then dozed off. . .living very lightly you might say.
Then I woke up to dry streets and a thinning overcast at 2:00 in the afternoon.  Yikes.  By 2:20 we were packed and loaded and rolling toward Halong Bay.  That was a late start for what is generally a  three and a half hour ride if everything goes right.  But better late than letting the dry spell go to waste.  At the turn off from the Hai Phong road onto QL-1, which would have lead to QL-18 and the most direct route to Halong, we carried on straight ahead on old QL-5, the Hai Phong road, also the oldest 4-lane freeway in the country.  Why, you ask, would I do that?  Er. . .well, the last time I traveled QL-18 out to the Bay it was gosh awful, over crowded, under maintained and generally a mess.  It used to be a sweet little road when I first met it, the sort of 2-lane road you'd take a friend to ride on just for pleasure.  Then the Koreans and Japanese as well as the locals, built factory after factory alongside it, and bit by bit it became awful, with far more traffic than road way too often.  The Hai Phong road, by contrast, has grown into its industry pretty nicely.  The truckers that run up and down it are professionals and do well enough without scaring the rest of us too badly.  So I held the little horse straight ahead for Hai Phong, intending to turn aside on QL-10 just on the outskirts of the city and thence across country to Eastern QL-18, which we should find at Uong Bi.
We did, but sunset and then late dusk caught us on the outskirts and we stopped the night in Uong Bi.  If you were along for the ride last year you'll already know about UB. . .I'd never spent the night before and liked it perfectly well last trip, even with the monstrous coal burning generating plant just down the street from the hotel I ended up in.  This trip UB has a problem.  It's getting a new water main  on one side of Main Street, and all new underground electricity on the other side of Main Street, and they're trying to get it done all at once, so. . .there are two ditches, one on one side of Main Street and one on the other.  It gets worse.  The street trees used to grow in a lovely long row on each side of the street, spaced neatly, about 30 feet apart.  They'd been doing really well, some of them too big to get your arms around (though mostly a little smaller than that). . .and they're all gone.  Where the ditches are dug clear out they are gone entirely, nothing left but the mud and crushed rock of the backfill.  Further along the project they've just been cut down and hauled away and their stumps stand, still above the right of way, but only a few inches above.  Crews of men with pry bars and shovels are digging out the roots that will be in the way of the new pipes and the orange plastic conduits.   Yes, it's a mess, though every shop and house has a temporary wood-plank bridge to get across the mud or the gaping hole.  It makes for an interesting approach to the hotel steps with the motorbike but she's good at narrow bridges even if she scares me sometimes.
So that was our first night on the road this year.  The rice restaurant just down the block still served a large and tasty dinner and after that, a short walk to see the neighborhood again by night lights, and then to bed and sleep.  It was a start.  The bike ran, the rain held off, we got to a good hotel and had a good dinner.  Nothing particularly wonderful, but a start.  There was a good football game on the big screen TV down in reception. . .the Asia Cup playoffs, I think that was Laos and Cambodia in Red and White.  They play well and the crowds love them.  You can stand and watch quite a while before you remember you were headed upstairs to bed.
The morning came in with rain running hard in the street, but with the gutters gone along with the street trees just adding to the mess. . .but we'd already begun a trip and so dodged quickly down the street to an egg sandwich lady working under a big umbrella on what was left of the sidewalk and the front steps of a shop that was closed. She did things a little differently than I'm used to, but her blend of herbs was fine and the eggs were well-fried without being crisped. . .then she squeezed the whole sandwich between a pair of hinged wire grates, the sort of thing you might use to keep hamburger patties from falling into a barbecue grill, and put the whole thing over a hot little charcoal fire to toast.  It came out squished together and crispy on the outside.. . .and somehow quite all right.  I took it down the street a few doors to a fancy but empty coffee shop and ate it with an expensive iced coffee chased with a strong flavored ice tea.  Really quite fine, though the straw and the curly plastic stirring stick seemed unnecessary in the normal course of breakfast coffee.  While I munched and sipped and wrote up yesterday's diary (my almost invariable morning), a small gaggle of the real patrons came in, young and lovely business women very nicely dressed to start their day in a properly chic coffee shop.  I felt a bit out of place, but they still smiled at me in my jeans and plaid shirt (with the monstrous gap in front of my smile) and one of them went through the whole standard introductory question list.  So, once the horse had stopped for breakfast just down the road, we were both ready for the day.  I had on the whole outfit, rain pants, coat and plastic boots, but it wasn't stormy really, just a mizzling rain and we didn't have far to go to Quang Yen town., so I didn't rig the rain cape.
From Uong Bi on to Quang Yen is just 10 kilometers more and it's easy riding on a dead level, dead straight little road with almost no traffic.. .what riding a bike in VN is supposed to be!  That leads you right into town and out again and over the bridge you have to cross to get to Mr. Chan's boatyard.  As soon as you come down off the bridge you turn off, hard to the left, to take the dike road downstream along the river.  About a block further on the road (which I knew to be a nicely paved little thing) turned to mud.  Oh goodness. , ,more sewer work? The electrical lines are still overhead.  Perhaps it's just to be repaved.  One way or another, it's slow and messy going for quite a ways.  And then it's all fine again and the two of us went running downstream on the nice little road I remembered.
And that leads to the boatyard on the Chanh River where the gorgeous "old" fishing/sailing junk was built, what almost two years ago now, where Mr. Le Duc Chan, master boat builder and the umpteenth generation of boatbuilders in his family sends fleets of new fishing boats to sea every year.  I'd planned to look in, admire the boat again, have a quick tour of the old boatyard and see what's building now, drink tea with Chan perhaps, and then move quietly along before lunch.  H'mm.  Well, to begin with, the boatyard is going strong, four wooden boats building, and if I counted them all, five new steel boats in various stages. . .and some other boats pulled out for repairs, a very busy boat yard indeed.  But the pretty sailing junk is moored at the extreme offshore end of the yard, moldering away,   She's been given an engine and her graceful sailing rudder has been taken off and an improvised motorboat's rudder sort of stuck on to a bracket willy nilly. . .no doubt it works for motoring, but it wouldn't do for sailing. . .,which I suppose is fine, her sails lie hanging in shreds from her spars.  Clearly, she's fallen on hard times.  Chan and I don't have enough language in common to explain complicated things like contractual payments and foreclosure and dispute resolution, heck, we don't get too far past "Hi, good to see you again" between my Vietnamese and his English.  His grandboy with the laptop helped a lot, transcribing his grandpa's comments into google translate in more or less real time, but that's a tenuous route for communication!  So, I can't tell you how the sailing junk came to be as she is, but I'd wager that if you have a small handful of money you could take her away and make her shine again.  I'd love to, she's a fine sailing vessel and could be again.  She won't go in my carry-on though, and I couldn't afford to keep her at home anyway.  Anyone else interested?
Well, besides the awful news about the sailing junk, the real news from the boat yard is that, as he said last trip he might, Mr. Chan has gone into steel boat building.  The government prefers it, the customers are asking for it and the wood supply is really shrinking.  He had to build in steel or stop building very much at all.  As the 11th generation of master boat builders in the family, he just took up the challenge, built a new crane way to handle the heavier steel plate and shapes and went to work building.  In the first year (assuming I got this right) the yard put out 20 steel vessels.  Right this moment there are five a building, two on the ways and three in the water.  That's not to say the wooden boats are finished, he has four woodies building as well and a couple up for repairs too.
What with one thing and another I ended staying for lunch and finally got away to Halong City a little after two.

There she sits,anchored and end tied to the mud bank, her sails rotted off her spars, her cabin top filthy and her oars weathering badly.  That's fresh water she's lying in, so nobody is eating her below the water line, but without sailing and keeping her topsides salted down she can't last forever.  The stainless steel rudder will no doubt handle her as a motor boat, but she'll not balance to sail. . .needs the old wooden rudder extending forward under the hull.  Oh sigh.

Mr. Chan among the new steel hulls abuilding upland.  The yard has no rolls, but the plating gets jacked and pulled into fair curves.  He's still building pretty boats!

The concave stem profile, ample flair and springy shear line (the curve of her topsides), will make her dry in a head sea.  The cabin shows traces of wood inside, but I did NOT go up that gangway to have a closer look

An older wooden vessel, in for repairs, with a new steel boat tied off on either side.  This smaller steel boat still has no wood in her cabin. . .and I suppose she may not.  That's a lovely fair hull though, even if it's not wood.

She's getting quite close to launch day, sitting blocked up on the launchway.  Note the wooden hull coming along in the background!

Bottom planking complete and some frames going in, Chan builds a hull like this in about a month.  He has 40 men working on the steel boats but still has 20 men building in wood.  The new building shed will make for dry welding on rainy days.

She's an old "Halong Bay Squarehead" (that's just my name, nobody else calls them that), she's up for major refurbishing. . .note the holes drilled into her hold. . .she'll keep her fish alive on board rather than worrying with ice.

And there hou have three wooden hulls coming along nicely

Chan is a constant model builder, making models in various scales and sizes, of all the different sorts of Halong Bay junks.

This is one of his larger models,. too big for the table top but too small to take sailing.  H'mm.

Chan and his Lady Wfe, in the run up to what turned out to be a very nice lunch.  This is a very pleasant outdoor room, under a tin roof with the tin panels insulated. . .very nice in almost any local weather.

My only real mission in the City was to meet with Ms. Cuc, the amazing innovator at Indochina Junk cruise line (and all sorts of new and more interesting tourism developments).  Ms. Cuc has been a huge help and become a dear friend in the past few years, arranging for me to meet people and go places I'd never have managed alone, some of which were really important to my understanding of the local boat building (and monster basket boat weaving) business.  This year I wasn't looking for more help, the book after all has gone to the publishers, but a visit to Viet Nam without a visit to Ms. Cuc was unthinkable. . .and there was the matter of seeing her new house, a topic of much conversation last trip. 

Ms. Cuc's new house, two full stories and a penthouse room and rooftop patio, soon to be a roof top garden no doubt.  The bricks are the universal in-fill between the concrete columns here, they almost never show, plastered inside and out and often with ornamental facing as well.

It's a thoroughly modern house for a thoroughly modern lady.  The steel ramp for bringing the motorbikes inside picks up and gets put out of the way when it's not needed.  

A hair dryer for the bike?? That's a new one.  She (the bike) was crusty after the ride in the rain and a year and a half of storage.

Just another Halong Bay rock.

Er. . .just another Halong Bay conference center??

Un. . .a couple of bridge pylons and a monstrous ferris wheel. . .that you can ride to on a cable car that carries 200 people and only costs $10 for a ticket.  Holy cow.

Harvest is still going on, but these fields have all been cut. 

We've kept track of this church out in the country since it was only half built.  About halfway home from Halong Bay on Highway 18

We managed, in the event, a running visit of several hours over the rest of that day and half of the next, and that at last leads to the hotel in question
I've stayed in hotels here that were dreadful and others that were lovely beyond expectations, and this one is an interesting combination.  From the outside it looks pretty grim, an old rough wood painted double door and the normal collapsible steel grillage to secure the place at night.  I'd been turned away from four hotels in a row and was becoming a bit worried as the afternoon wore on but still, I nearly skipped this one just to avoid its ugly facade.  Good luck prevailed though, and I went in, found they had a room (and only up 3 flights of stairs. . .about 60 stairs to be clear. . .and the room was gorgeous, with new lovely pine furniture, really nice, new tile on floors and walls, a sparkling bathroom and sweet smelling linens on a very firm mattress. . .all with a view out over the street and the lake beyond and the pretty hills beyond the lake.  But that still wouldn't rate a solid recommendation, many hotels are that good, more or less. . .but the people were lovely and the three-year old daughter absolutely charming (though she's currently down to just one front tooth. . .I can sympathize).  So here it is, if you're looking for a surprisingly lovely place to roost in Bai Chai, I'd strongly suggest "Nha Nghi Viet Dung", at 1058 duong Ha Long.  That is "Viet Dung Guesthouse, at 1058 Halong Street, Bai Chai.  There, I've done it.

This may be my ugliest photo of the year, but it's also some of the nicest use of pine in furniture I've ever seen.  It's all clear lumber and beautifully put together. . .with a flawless lacquer finish you could fall into and drown.  And the whole hotel room was like this, spotless, new and very nice.

Ah, but here's the best part.  She walked straight up to me, climbed in my lap and proceeded to talk my ear off, whether I understood a word or not.

We played with Barbies, Spiderman, an old adding machine (as a phone) and a nice empty box.  And then her Mom (or maybe grandma) made me pho and sweet coffee for breakfast.  Five stars I tell you, it just didn't look that good from outside!

And now, though there's a lot else been going on (a new tooth, a fuel filter, a new camera case, a visit to a huge "Sport" trade show and some pleasant people met . . .all of which might make a good story if I worked at it, it's time to be on the road.  The streets are dry and there's time to get to Sam Son at least before dark, and if the going is good, maybe all the way to Cua Lo for the night.  Southbound at last.