We’ve arrived in Halong Bay! After an early start, as in climbing into a taxi at 2.00am, we were at the airport by 3.00am. First priority was to go to the Roaming Man counter to pick up our mobile wifi device. This is a brilliant service which we’d used previously for a trip to Singapore. Keeping that in mind, you’d think I’d know how to use it wouldn’t you? More of that later! Anyway, I was happy to find that they do open 24 hours a day as I’d had my doubts. Next was check in, which also was painless enough. By 3.30 am we found ourselves with over two and a half hours to kill and had to resort to coffee in McDonalds, an establishment that the snob in me prefers never to patronise. However, on this occasion it fulfilled a purpose if only to give us somewhere to sit for an hour. This was more pertinent than you might think as the terminal appeared to be swamped with whole families sleeping anywhere that they could, including bench seats and booths in all the other eateries which happened to be closed for the night. The impression I got was that people with such early morning flights have arrived at the airport probably using the last train from KL to avoid hefty taxi fares. Our taxi cost us 208 Ringets which is about £41. I imagine if you’re travelling with a large family it could get to be a pretty costly business! Boarding the plane we got to our seats only to find a woman sitting by the window, which, me being a big child, was meant to be mine. Thankfully one of the cabin crew (stewardess, can you still say that these days or is it sexist to make a distinction of that sort?) noticed our hesitation and quickly realised the problem and without ceremony demanded that the woman sit in her own seat. Problem solved you might think. Not for Lynne it wasn’t. This woman whose nationality I have no idea of except to say she was obviously of an oriental persuasion, turned out to be a bit of a nut job, and she was sat right next to Lynne. First of all she demanded that I take a photo out of the window for her with her phone. Then she decided that the photo wasn’t good enough for her, didn’t she know I’m an internationally renowned (average) photographer? The second photo actually met with her approval, we still hadn’t moved from the loading area yet remember, so having taken her phone back she then decided she needed a selfie with Lynne and me in it too. We both smiled dutifully by way of humouring her and hoped she might settle down at that point. From my point of view I thought she had settled down but Lynne told me later that initially she refused to put her seatbelt on for take off and then wanted to raise the armrest so that she could rest her head on Lynne’s shoulder and presumably go to sleep!
I remember wondering why Lynne had suddenly cosied up to me, turns out it was just to get away from the mad woman on the other side! She also apparently told Lynne she had a nice nose. Yeah right, as long as your names W.C. Fields!🤥 All this time I had been sat looking out of the window, fascinated by the fantastic cloud formations and the flashes of lightning coming from within them. I did something I’ve never done before and took photos out of the window with my phone. I have to say, as a self confessed photography snob the camera on the Samsung Note 9 is brilliant but the photos taken from the aircraft window still turned out crap in spite of this, so I won’t be sharing them any time soon.
Coming back to Lynne’s mad friend. Thankfully halfway through the flight she found someone else to pester a few seats forward of where we were sitting so Lynne was spared the stress of a sorrowful goodbye to her new found soul mate! We landed at Hanoi airport at about 8.15 am which was 10 minutes earlier than scheduled. As soon as the seat belt signs were switched off, everyone leapt to their feet as they always do, I could see the mad woman pushing her way to the front much to the obvious annoyance of other passengers who were trying quite calmly to get their bags down from the overhead lockers. It’s difficult to comprehend such rudeness but it has to be said, this woman was obviously not quite right in the head.
Immigration didn’t take long and within 5 minutes of finding the baggage carousel our bags came trundling through. After seeing recent news reports of people waiting two hours for their bags at Birmingham we never cease to be amazed at how efficient other airports can be.
Lynne had pre booked a car to take us the 90 miles to our hotel in Halong Bay. The instruction was, that on exiting the terminal we should head for column 12 and there will be a driver displaying Lynne’s name. Well, we found column 12 easily. Oddly enough it was right there between columns 11 and 13. Unfortunately there was no sign of anyone displaying Lynne’s name. No problem really, the flight landed slightly early so give it a few minutes and they’ll probably be along. That brings me to the wifi device. After waiting for ten minutes we decided to ring the car company. So I turned on the wifi device and tried to get internet on my phone. The password is written on the casing of the unit and should have been simple. PWD62906279. You can probably see my mistake already but at the time I was having a major senior moment. So we had no driver and no internet. Consequently we couldn’t make a call without costing Dan a small fortune as our KL SIM cards are both on his account. At this point I went back into the airport and bought a new SIM card. The girl at the counter inserted it for me (ooer missus) and it cost about £8 for unlimited calls and internet for a week. Back at column 12 we were about to call the car company when a young guy came up with Lynne’s name on a piece of card. He didn’t apologise for being late but we soon realised the reason for this was that he didn’t speak a single word of English! We were soon on our way and only an hour late at this point. As soon as we were on the road I emailed Roaming Man to complain about my non working wifi device. They came back to me really quickly and said I could now put the password 62906279 in and it should work. This was an obvious light bulb moment as I realised PWD wasn’t part of the password, it just denotes that the following 8 numbers ARE the PassWorD, Duh! It worked immediately and I was left to reflect on what an idiot I can be at times, far too frequently if I’m absolutely honest.
On with the Journey. We soon realised that drivers in Vietnam seem to have scant regard for the rules of the road assuming there are any. Our driver who as I’d said previously didn’t speak a word of English seemed to be intent on communicating with the rest of the world by blowing the car horn every 5 seconds. In fact every manoeuvre whether it be overtaking or undertaking was accompanied by blasts of the horn. This made for a slightly nerve wracking ride where he seemed to have no fear of overtaking on the wrong side of the road whilst approaching a lorry or something equally big and heavy coming the other way. During our three and a half hour journey we realised anything goes on the streets in Vietnam. Motorbikes come at you on the wrong side of the road and everyone just blows their horn. It’s like, I’m driving this car, you’re in my way, blast of the horn, you better get outta the way! Lynne asked me about half way if I was liking it so far and I would have to say, so far, no not much. The small towns and the countryside we were passing through looked grubby and run down almost as if nothing had been repaired after what the locals actually call the American war! Our driver asked by showing me a pre written message on his phone if we would like to stop for a rest which we politely declined. Lets just get there and get this white knuckle ride over please. Five minutes later he stopped anyway to get himself a drink so I was left wondering why he even bothered to ask.
As we approached Halong Bay the surroundings began to look a bit more organised and we were relieved to finally reach the safety of the hotel. On arrival we then had to pay the driver the pre arranged fee for the trip. The cost for the aforementioned white knuckle ride was 1.6 million Vietnamese Dong. It sounds like a lot but actually equates to about £56. The currency is a bit crazy really, everything sounds expensive because it’s all in millions but one million is approximately £35.50 so even though we’re Dong millionaires, sadly it’s nothing to get excited about. As the driver drove off (?) most likely to honk his way back to Hanoi, we entered the hotel and checked in. The young lady who checked us in was extremely friendly and helpful. The room we had booked through booking.com turned out to be at the back of the hotel so I asked how much extra it would be to have a room with a view over the bay. It was roughly an extra £8 a night so we chose to upgrade. This gave us a great view from our balcony of the bay and the bridge to our left.
In the afternoon we walked the length of the town past lots of eateries looking for a restaurant which I’d read about on Trip Advisor but when after a long walk we found it, it looked empty which I always find off putting. Along the way we passed dozens of restaurants most of which had plastic bowls spread around the pavement full of various live fish, crabs, lobsters and octopus just waiting for the pot. It’s a bit like looking at a living menu thats looking back at you!
So after a long walk during which the heat and humidity really hit us hard, we walked as far again back to the hotel. As soon as we got back we both took showers to cool off. It certainly doesn’t take long to get a good sweat on whilst walking in the heat of the mid afternoon.
Later that evening having recovered slightly from the sweaty walk and our extremely early morning wake up call we decided to eat at one of the hotel restaurants. We opted for the Sakura Japanese Restaurant. I’m not a lover of the Japanese as you’ll probably know but their food is to die for! Cutting a very long story short I had a huge plate of Sashimi and Lynne had Salmon Teriyaki Bento whatever the hell that is. The problem was that Lynnes meal arrived slightly after mine so she had the audacity to steal a piece of my raw Octopus. Octopus is always my favourite part of Sashimi and I wasn’t best pleased to be sharing it (I always was a selfish git). It has to be said that the food and the service in this restaurant was fantastic and I’m hoping Lynne and I didn’t embarrass ourselves with our limited grasp of Japanese etiquette. One moment where I might have embarrassed myself was when I took a pinch of the mysterious green paste off the side of my plate not knowing what it was. I put it delicately in my mouth showing consumate mastery of my chopsticks and instantly recoiled and had to dig it out of my mouth with my fingers! I now know it to be Wasabi. Well, it almost blew my frigging head off to the point where it was actually quite painful to a measure of 11 out of 10. Why serve you all that wonderful food and then booby trap the plate with something that damn near kills you? All joking aside, I’m sure there must be a way to eat Wasabi without it melting your insides and the food generally was incredible. We went to bed that night well and truly knackered after a long day of travelling and looking forward to the short cruise which we had booked for the following day.
Wandering Wildman 