Took a Wrong Turn

So as you can tell from the last photo update, we are in Cat Ba! Sadly it seems like we came at the wrong time as the weather is miserable and the place is deserted. Being here feels like booking a holiday in Skegness in November so we are getting back on the boat tomorrow and heading south to Hoi An.

The island itself is quite nice looking but at the moment it is undergoing big changes. Huge areas of Dubai-esque grand holiday areas are being built with banners showing huge hotels, parks and yachts everywhere. This is what they think is going to happen but at the moment it is hard to imagine. The idea seems to be to turn this area into the ultimate luxury resort but so far they are not too far along with it. The sheer numbers of abandoned half finished buildings in Hanoi don’t fill me with confidence about this ever being built.

Vietnam is an odd place. There are endless high end shops, entire malls of them, that are empty or shut down. Huge grand projects either completed but unused or abandoned and left to rot. It’s like they have built a modern society all at once without realising that there’s very few people to join it so it’s just failed.

I’m sure eventually they will be able to support it but they have tried to skip too many stages of development for it to work at the moment.

Anyway at the moment we are freezing and find it hard to remember being in 30 degree heat. It’s 12 here at the moment and they don’t have any heating in their buildings…

On other notes we still have loads to upload onto the blog but are struggling with slow internet and doing it all on phones! These include a video of what it’s like crossing the road in Hanoi and some cheat sheets for travelling to routes we have done so far. Basically a combination of all our research and our own personal experiences of what it’s like right now.