17. ZOOM AND THANG

Cat Ba Island is, according to our guide book, Vietnam's "adventure sports Mecca". By Mecca I suppose they meant the most sacred site of Islam, but the island's main town has more in common with the chain of popular bingo halls. Gaudy neon lights reflect in the blank eyes of pleasure seekers and the grinning teeth of touts, and the whole place has the tawdry whiff of a Blackpool holiday about it.

True, the island itself is alive and breathing with beauty: wet, dense jungle, vegetation exploding across the hillsides in stunning varieties of green. In the harbour, ancient limestone karsts spew hundreds of feet upwards into the mist like sudden molten eruptions while red-sailed junks, shanty houseboats and tiny fishing craft loll on the warm green waters of the South China Sea. But I can't enjoy any of this at the moment, because I'm stalking through the sweat-fogged evening town looking for a man named Mr Zoom who I believe has stolen my underpants.

Zoom runs the cheapest guesthouse on the island - a bargain four US dollars for a double room, and the mosquitoes eat for free. For the first two nights we stayed with him, his big, jolly presence was inescapable - sleeping on a campbed in reception, buzzing up alongside us on his scooter as we walked through town, serving up food in his nearby Mr Zoom's restaurant. Then, a couple of days ago, we gave him our laundry. He said we'd have it back within 24 hours, and he hasn't been seen since.

At the same time as he disappeared, the hot water stopped working in the hotel. Cat Ba has experienced a tourist boom over the last ten years and far too many hotels have been built. Dozens now stand near-empty along the sea front; in Zoom's we're the only guests apart from a silent man on a laptop. I'm worried that the value of our laundry has exceeded the plummeting value of his business and he's decided to sever his hot water supply contract, abandoned the hotel and gone off to start a new life somewhere far away with my underpants.

The issue has now come to a head as we've signed up to go on a trek through the jungle tomorrow and it strikes me that I ought to at least start off wearing clean underwear, given the likelihood that something will go wrong.

I stomp towards Zoom's restaurant, like most on the island nothing more than scaffolding poles and tarpaulin with plastic furniture underneath and outside. One of his underlings approaches to greet me.

"Yes sir! Please sit down," he grins, muscling me towards a table.

"Where is Mr Zoom?"

"Yes sir, here!" he says, pointing to the sandwich board saying "Mr Zoom's".

"No, no. I need to speak to Mr Zoom."

"Here."

"Mr Zoom, the person. The manager."

"OK!"

It occurs to me this very helpful man can't understand a word I'm saying. I test it out.

"I haven't changed my underpants for two-and-a-half days," I tell him.

"OK!" he says again, the same can-do grin fixed on his face.

I prise myself away and head back to the hotel. Another staff member is sleeping on Zoom's vacated camp bed. She snaps to life when I arrive.

"Where are my clothes?" I ask. Having just woken up, she looks, understandably, as if I should know that myself. "Washing," I say. I struggle to think of a mime for 'laundry'. It's times like this I wish I wasn't such a lazy sod about learning local languages.

Somehow, though, she understands my mime and luckily she doesn't think its a game and come back with a mime of her own. Instead she plucks out two bags of freshly clean and refreshingly cool pants, although they're a bit sweaty by the finish. Zoom eventually re-appears a day later, having been to Hai Phong, no doubt in his own underpants, and the hot water is magically restored. To be fair, the island is so sultry we never really needed it.

The whole thing makes me feel I might have trust issues with the locals. Zoom, for instance, is not an international underwear thief but only what he purports to be: the intensely friendly owner of a bargain hotel and restaurant. To test out my new found confidence and trust, we book a full day adventure cruise and transport to Hanoi with a character calling himself Mr Victor Thang.

It's not a name that inspires trust to Western ears, is it? Furthermore he speaks quietly, unlike everyone else in Vietnam, which makes me wonder what he's up to. He seems very nice, though, and there isn't much else to do in Cat Ba town apart from wander up and down the sea front laughing at badly translated restaurant menus that offer dishes as exotic as "Fat Body of Religious Interest" and "Appealing Comedy Discharge". (Both out of our price range, thankfully.)

Not pictured: old ladies in Benny-Hill style pursuit

And what a fine time we had on Mr Thang's tour. The most entertaining thing I've done so far is hire a motorbike scooter in the hill town of Sapa, largely to escape from some persistent tribeswomen traders. But Mr Thang's tour ran it a close second, the only drawback being that on this occasion we weren't being pursued by cute little indigenous old ladies in traditional dress. We boarded the boat at eight, basked on the upper deck as it cruised among the bay's hundreds of rocky islets, enjoyed a delicious on-board lunch with a merciful absence of comedy discharges, and spent the afternoon kayaking through caves and lagoons and leaping from the boat into the warm, still sea. Last stop was the beach on a place called Monky Island. We trooped all the way to the highest point on the island in the hope of seeing a monkey but there were none, which made it doubly frustrating to find a couple of them sitting in the beachfront bar when we returned. To be fair, the monkey's tried to make up for it by stealing people's clothing and biting a Vietnamese holidaymaker on the bottom. How we laughed! She's probably got rabies now.

And so ended our stay at 'adventure sports Mecca'. We never got to play bingo, but the trip did restore some of my faith. And Mr Thang's ferry and bus tickets even got to us to Hanoi on schedule, the first on-time transport I've encountered in Asia.