On the 2nd day of our trip in Ha Long Bay, Paolo and I, along with 4 other friends, went on a trekking trip through the mountains of Cat Ba Island. Luckily we had a Vietnamese guide, Nick, that knew where we were going. The destination was a lookout tower on top of the mountain. The tower is barely visible in this picture.
At the start of the trail, Nick said there's an easy way and a hard way and we would first take the easy way up then the hard way down. If I had the slightest inclination of what his notion of hard and easy were, I would actually describe it far differently, "the extremely hard way and an impossible way". Though it might be relative, the first 200 meters up these very very steep, slippery steps were actually the easiest part of the hike, only because it's the only part that resembled a trail. The rest of the "trail" was going through bushes, trees, rocks, and mud in humid 90 plus degree weather. If it wasn't for Nick we would of most likely died out there, or still been roaming the jungles of Vietnam. While we were gasping for air completely muddy in our hiking boots and sweat soaked clothes, Nick our guide, was breezily climbing through in his flip flops with out even breaking a sweat or a getting a smudge of dirt.
Only after going on this trekking trip do you really realize how the Vietnamese won the war ...seriously
The majority of the hike consisted of climbing through rocks and walking down steep muddy trails.
Watch that last step it's a doozy (Some of the stairs on the watch tower were missing platforms so you had to be extremely careful or it's a very quick way down).
Finally after reaching the peak of the trail we got to climb an old watch tower and rest for a moment while enjoying the scenery.
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