Those day-trippers had the right idea. Make your way to Ha Long City on our own. We showed up at the pier at around 10:00, asked around among the tour operators hustling on the dock, did a little bargaining, and hitched a ride on a tour boat for 80,000 dong per person. There are no hydrofoils or fast boats from Ha Long City to Cat Ba anyway, so you might as well take a tour boat, and it really is a great way to see the bay.
We were once again on a lousy budget junk, but who cares, we weren't spending the night on it! We could have bought lunch on the boat, but instead we just brought along some sandwiches of our own. The boat stopped for the cave tour, which we could have done for an extra 20,000 dong, but we were understandably a bit caved out at that point.
Sometimes you should just go!
When the boat stopped for a swim, we all put on our suits and leapt from the top deck into the water -- something we missed out on during our rained-out budget tour, and the high-priced tour boats had no top decks. Now, that was fun. Hell, we'd pay five bucks just to do that alone.
We saw as much of beautiful Ha Long Bay as anyone really needs to see anyway, could have gone kayaking (again) if we wanted to, and arrived in Cat Ba in the evening, where we found a cheap room, hooked up with some other travellers for a sea food dinner, tipped a few glasses of bia hoi on the promenade, and no one woke us up at 07:00 because we had to check out and catch the tour boat back to Ha Long. We'd been to Cat Ba twice on tours, but this time we were able sample the seafood, the beaches, and the treks at our leisure.
For the trip back, a 45-minute, US$7 hydrofoil ride took us to Hai Phong, connecting to a cheap two-hour bus to Hanoi. For those of you who cringe at the idea of a package tour at any price, it's an option well-worth the extra expense and effort.
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