Fabulista Moves: On to Cat Ba (Island)

11:30 a.m. It’s amazing what the bourgeoisies can do. I also believe that a picture paints a thousand words (see left) – or at least in my case, enough to describe what I am trying to communicate and thus rest my case.

4:00 p.m. Arrived at Cat Ba (finally) after a 5-hour journey via road and land (“Planes, Train and Automobile”?).

5:00 p.m. Moved out of the hotel for a very late lunch (or a VERY early dinner, by local standards – hell, by any standards actually. Unfortunately, 5 is not exactly a common time for locals to eat. So my strategy of “see where the locals dine” can’t be put in use here.

We settled at a “hai sahn bienh” (literally - seafood restaurant) “for the ambience”. I suppose if you come from the city, a restaurant with everything constructed of bamboo can be considered “ambience”. However, I guess in local terms, that would be known as economizing.

We ordered a few items; only the vegetables were passable as restaurant-style dishes. The grilled prawns which we were excited about were dry – I guess in Vietnam, they don’t grill with baste – and had obtained the texture of chicken. In my opinion that’s a great feat, surf that tastes like turf. Not easy.

Next we ordered, fried chicken, which was a misnomer. It should really have been called rubber chicken. The meat from the thigh, which is known in the culinary world as the tenderest part of the fowl meat was served on a plate and resembled something akin to dried clay. It was dry as the desert and with one bite, it threatened to crack even my molars. Although I do have a taste for certain types of rubber, in my humble opinion, they should be reserved in a different room – just not the one for dining purposes, please.

At the end of the dinner, we decided on a walk around Cat Ba town. The little jaunt took us to the remnants of what was a busy wet market, say two to three hours ago. And trust me, unless you are familiar with a wet market, the lingering scent of it is not what you want to partake of. However, watching the facial expression (read: grimace) on some of the less-experienced was well worth the trip down the alley way.

When we decided to return to our hotel, it was 7:30 p.m., aka LDT – Local Dinner Time. That’s when things became clearer – the locals were eating at places that were nearer the resort. I made a mental note of the restaurants where the locals were. Those are the place that we’d try the next few nights.

The restaurant where we ate was completely empty.