Xin chào everyone,
It’s hard for me to believe, but my 30-day Vietnamese visa is almost up! I’m writing this from a little cafe in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. On Saturday morning I will board a direct flight to Osaka, Japan, to begin the next chapter of my Watson.
Hanoi is a city that demands your attention. To walk even a few paces with your eyes on a map is to risk being toppled by a scooter or flattened by a truck. For someone like me with absolutely no internal compass, this makes for slow goings.
Hanoi is the birthplace of phở (noodle soup), which is often eaten alongside coffee, beer, or fried dough sticks (quẩy). The old town has little streets crammed with scooters and stores, narrow balconies enclosed with painted metal bars, birdcages, french colonial buildings, and a generally buzzing atmosphere that never seems to slow down.
Just four hours to the southeast of Hanoi by bus, the island of Cát Bà presents a very different pace of life. At 110 square miles it is the largest island of Lan Ha Bay, a maze of limestone karst* islands along Vietnam’s Northern coast. If you’ve ever heard of the famous Halong Bay, Lan Ha is its less famous little sibling just to the south.
* A karst island (or other karst topographical features like caves, etc) is formed by rock dissolving in water over time. Rainwater dissolves CO2 from the air and soil, forming a weak carbonic acid which seeps into the bedrock and dissolves it. This process happens with carbonate bedrocks like limestone, dolomite, or marble.
According to a few English-language sources I found, the name Cát Bà derives from “Cac ba”, which translates to “Women’s Island”. Legend has it that several centuries ago, three Tranh Dynasty women from the mainland were murdered and their bodies washed up on different beaches along the island. Local fishermen found them, and built temples to honor them near the shore.
The seas around Cát Bà are incredibly rich, and fishing has always been crucial to the success and prosperity of the island’s communities. In the evenings, the streets of Cát Bà town are lined with women hawking cuts of fish and cracking oysters open with small pickaxes - yum! But perhaps the most iconic piece of the island’s maritime culture is the floating village of Cai Beo, just off the main island’s eastern coast.
I visited Cai Beo Village by boat on a very gray and drizzly day. My guide was a young man named Bui who grew up on Cát Bà, and was very keen on getting our small group of shivering tourists to swim in every bay we came across. “You only live once!” he urged, “You don’t want to regret!”. When we chatted about Maine, he was astounded that someone from such a cold place could be so utterly wimpy about swimming in tropical waters. I have no real defense for myself, other than the fact that “YOLO” is not a sustainable way to live during a 12-month solo traveling fellowship.
Cai Beo is home to a few hundred people who live year-round in wooden houses perched atop floating platforms. The vast network of limestone islands shelter them from typhoons and waves from the open ocean. Archeological evidence suggests that people have been living in this area for about 6,000 years, making it the oldest fishing village in the country.
Until just a few decades ago the people of Cai Beo were fishermen, but the bay became so overfished that most villagers have since turned to aquaculture. Red snapper, cobia, butterfish, and groupers are grown in large nets slung below the surface, held up at the edge by floating wooden platforms. Styrofoam used to be the most common floatation material, but the government recently banned it in an attempt to cut down on water pollution. Most villagers now use large blue plastic barrels which are more robust, but expensive.
These households are extremely self-sufficient. Large floating rain barrels can catch a year’s worth of freshwater during one typhoon season, and floating markets make the rounds periodically. Some village families catch baitfish, which they then sell to other families who use it to feed their farmed fish (and their dogs!).
On our visit to one of these floating fish farms, Bui chucked a few sardines into a pen. From the murky depths, four enormous groupers (each probably 3-4 feet long) rose up and gulped them down, their white mouths flashing. These behemoth fish are incredibly valuable, fetching high prices at the market in part because of how difficult it is to farm them. Groupers grow very slowly and are especially vulnerable to disease - Bui told me that this is because they naturally live in very deep waters and don’t like to be cooped up at the surface like this. A single grouper, if well cared-for, can live for decades.
One interesting technique that the Cai Beo fish farmers use to combat disease for their fish is a kind of sanitizing bath. They soak individual fish in chlorinated water for a few minutes to “shock their skin,” killing off any mites or pathogens without harming the fish (at least the vast majority of the time). For slow-growing older fish especially, this helps them survive within the confines of a fish farm over long periods of time. I have to admit, seeing all these enormous fish trapped in little cages depressed me a bit. I know the people of Cai Beo have great respect for these animals, but it is sad to see such amazing creatures denied practically all of their natural behaviors.
As we left the floating village, I asked Bui how things in Cai Beo have changed in his lifetime. He told me that the village used to be much larger, but the Vietnamese government has put a blanket ban on new floating households. These villages are incredibly difficult to regulate, and the government is very concerned about the environmental impact of people living and farming inside the fragile marine environment of Lan Ha Bay. Each time a family moves to the mainland, the village shrinks.
When I asked him what he thought about this, Bui was undecided. On one hand, it’s a unique and valuable piece of Cat Ba’s cultural heritage and part of what makes this place so special. But on the other hand, he explained, perhaps it’s better for the village kids to be closer to school and have broader opportunities that come with living on land.
Even though Cat Ba seems sleepy compared to the mega resorts and cruises of Halong Bay, tourism is becoming ever more important. Cai Beo Village is part of Cat Ba’s draw for many tourists, and the fish farms provide fresh, expensive seafood to hotels and upscale restaurants. And yet, tourism development is straining the same ecosystems that fishermen and farmers depend on. In town, I walked by the construction site for an enormous “Tourist urban area complex” going up in the main town, the plastic signage covering the chain link fence promising pools, spas, restaurants, and even a casino. Whether the growth of tourism proves fortunate or fatal to Cai Beo Village remains to be seen, but several people I talked to were hopeful that Cat Ba can avoid the overexploitation that Halong Bay has suffered.
I have truly loved my time in Vietnam, but I found that one month is not enough time to immerse yourself in a new country, make connections, and pursue all the questions that come up along the way. I’m hoping that my longer visa in Japan will allow me to go slowly, and pursue new threads with more flexibility.
Until next time,
Grace
