Halong Bay to Cat Ba Island

On Saturday we checked out of our hotel and I decided we should walk to the pier (where we wanted to get a ferry to cat ba bay) with our backpacks on so we could feel like real backpackers, after about 5 minutes we realized this was a big mistake!! It was about a 4km walk and our bags were very heavy, we had to walk on the roads with the traffic a lot of the time and it was HOT!
When we finally got to the pier after talking to a few people we discovered the pier we actually needed was another 15km away so we got a taxi out there. We had been told the next ferry left at 1.30 and it was only 11am so when we got our ticket and were been ushered straight onto a boat we were pretty sure we were in the wrong place but got on anyway. We ended up on a local boat with no other tourists but the people were really nice, a little girl was mesmerised by the lion hanging from my pack and her family gave us some ‘sophie’ cake which turned out was delicious. Another couple helped us when we thought the boat had docked on a different island than the one we wanted.
Once off the boat we found out it had docked 20km from the main part of town so got in a mini bus and drove with them down to the main part of town.
We then had to walk around for TWO HOURS in the boiling hot and then the pouring rain with our backpacks on because no one had any vacancies. We tried to get straight on another boat to go to Hai Phong but missed the first boat by 2 mins (it left 20 minutes early) and then the ticket lady disappeared so we couldn’t buy tickets for the next boat. After a while a lady approached us saying her family had a hostel we could stay in for 900,000VND her husband came down and walked us up to the room so we could have a look at it. This room was ok, although we used our own sleeping bags for the first time because they sheets didn’t look like they had been changed and yet again we didn’t get to have showers due to the bathroom been gross!! (This was two days of no showers and A LOT of sweating so not good!)
We went for a walk and found an internet café so researched how to get off the island tomorrow and decided to get a bus-boat-bus combo back to Hanoi and then an overnight train to Hue.
We had a nice dinner at a restaurant over looking the water and boats and cliffs.