March 7th
No one told me my warranty would be up when I turned 70. I had a poor night's sleep then got up for the 6:15 AM Vietnamese Tai Chi outside on the top deck and felt that something was wrong. Several trips to the bathroom later and I realized that I had what we think is traveler's diarrhea. Clearly, I am in no condition to go on the day's 5-hour excursion which includes a visit to a native village, kayaking, and a bike ride on Cat Ba Island. We tell the staff that I won't be going which prompts a visit from the assistant cruise director. I can tell by her questions that she is worried that I've got some sort of norovirus which is the scourge of the cruise ship industry. She is relieved when I tell her that Chris and Beth are both doctors and that it is just traveler's diarrhea.
Beth, Mark and Chris head off while I lay down. Along the way, I got to view some of the behind-the-scenes magic that makes these cruises work. With the people on the 3 day/2 night plan on their Day 2 excursion, the ship heads back to the original pick-up point to drop off the 2 day/1 night people and pick up the next group of passengers. In the meantime, every square foot of the ship is cleaned. I'm not sure, but it appears that it doesn't matter what your "regular" job is on the ship (i.e. food service, cook), everyone gets involved in the cleaning.
Once the new people are on board, the ship goes back to the excursion area where the speedboat/beach Day 1 people get off. They return back about the same time that the Day 2 excursion people do, then the ship moves to the spot where we moor for the night.
I knew that I could eat lunch at 1 PM with the new arrivals, but didn't feel like eating anything. A while later there is a knock on the door. It is one of our servers from breakfast checking in on how I was doing and bringing me a cup of ginger tea which the Vietnamese swear by for stomach issues. That was very kind!
While all the cleaning was going on and I was the only customer on the ship, I prowled around looking for somewhere with a Wi-Fi signal. It wasn't strong enough to work on the blog, but I was able to choose my fantasy soccer team!
Later, Beth filled me in on what they did during their excursion. First, a launch took them from our ship to a secondary dock where they boarded a day boat to take them to Cat Ba Island. On the way, they had to stop at a dock where government officials checked how many people were on the boat. We think that this is because the area is a national park and the number of people visiting is controlled by the government. Once cleared to enter, they proceeded to Cat Ba Island. Once there, part of the group got on bikes and part got on large golf carts to the Viet Hai village. Their guide showed them the village, including an old-style house. Then they tried several kinds of rice "wine" which came in five flavors ficus, honey, banana, apple and...snake. This is really what I would call hooch made out of fermented rice and then flavored with everything else. I'm not sure who thought snake was a good idea for a flavor! Beth tried the honey, which was supposed to be the best and thought that it was vile, so she did not partake in any of the others. Mark reports that the snake did impart some flavor to the wine, but he did not elaborate on whether that flavor was positive.
After the drinking (some of the visitors were really going at it!), they went back to the day boat for lunch. Then the boat moved to Three Peaches Beach for kayaking. It turns out that they had more people who wanted to kayak than they had kayaks so the guide and three of the passengers took turns jumping off the roof of the day boat into the water in their underwear while everyone else kayaked. Mark took pity on Beth, who has barely ever kayaked, and went with her while Chris paddled on her own. After exploring for a while, everyone came back to the day boat and were returned back to our ship. Here are some pictures:
The second picture is a traditional bridge to walk across the rice paddies although Beth tells me that they didn't used to have handrails. You can see the snake rice wine in the middle of the top row and the inside of a traditional house complete with Ho Chi Minh's picture.
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