Sorry for the Group Email

Our first day in Halung Bay was spent lounging on a boat. It was only fair that we spent our second day being good tourists and Doing Things.

Cat Ba island sits 40km from the Vietnamese mainland, and the whole thing is protected as a national park, not least in an attempt to head off the damage done by the hoards of tourists that head there every year. It looks absolutely extraordinary. Gliding in over the water it was easy enough to pretend that we were explorers. Green, jungle-capped hills rose from thick, impenetrable-looking valleys, inhabited by monkeys. There’s not much chance of seeing them, though; since tourists (including us, I know, I know) began arriving, the colonies have begun pushing further into the jungle.

Still, we kept our eyes peeled. It would have been silly not to. And we climbed, topping off our morning with the ascent of a creaking watchtower, at the top of which was a spectacular view and a collection of decaying floorboards which rose alarmingly at one end if you stood at the other. But the views were immense. Aside from the odd small house and single-carriage road, civilisation was all-but lost to us; the only thing we could hear was the wind.

We made our wobbly way down, and in the afternoon headed to Monkey Island. For a few reasons. Firstly because there’s a shiver of embarrassing geek pleasure at visiting a place named after a computer game that will always have a (secret) place in my heart. We also tried kayaking, which is both slow and equal in wetness to, say, swimming.

The main reason for going, of course, was to see monkeys. We had seen some just before we leapt in our kayak. They had been stealing food from the tourists on the beach, prompting us to leave our bags in the care of our tour guide. The monkeys on Monkey Island, you see, although technically wild, are familiar enough with tourists to know that there are treats to be found in their pockets and bags, and there are stories of families emerging from the water to find their carefully-piled belongings have vanished into the jungle.

When we got back, though, the monkeys were gone. We looked everywhere, scrambling over piles of razor-sharp rocks into the jungle in the hope of monkeys. But they were hiding. Our guide shouted impatiently in the distance. Despondent at the somewhat-ridiculous thought of visiting Monkey Island and not seeing any of its eponymous wildlife, we trudged back.

Suddenly, a tiny head popped up over the roof of a building. Then another. Monkeys!

There was not, I’m afraid, a deep and significant moment of inter-species understanding. They looked at us, we looked at them. Both they and us, I suspect were hoping to the ends of the earth that the other didn’t attack. Them because we were bigger, and us because the monkeys on the island are famed for their aggressiveness and sharp claws. We stared and shot the monkeys for five minutes until we ran – literally – for our boat.

Wild monkeys and blue-green water. Vietnam edged its way towards the top of our list of favourite places.

Dave likes monkeys. You can see more of them in the Flickr set, as well as some comments from a thoroughly nice chap who actually knows what they are.