From Hanoi to Hue

Hanoi: Good Morning Vietnam!

After just over 3 weeks in China and Hong Kong, I finally headed into Southeast Asia, where my first stop would be Hanoi, Vietnam. My flight was a rather frustrating one; they changed my gate at the last minute leaving Hong Kong, then the flight was delayed while we waited for several lost passengers, and when we finally arrived, I waited over an hour for my bag to come through. After about 40 minutes waiting, as other passengers from my plane began to peel off with their bags, I was starting to sweat. Having lost my bag once before, when flying out to Honduras, baggage claim is always a nerve-wracking wait for me. Thankfully, it did eventually appear, and the relief of seeing my bulging gray and red backpack emerge onto the conveyor belt was wonderful. I caught a taxi from the airport into central Hanoi, and after about 20 minutes the fear of being robbed or swindled somehow died down. It took about an hour to get to my hostel and when I arrived I quickly discovered that I'd managed to mess up the booking. I booked a lot of hostels for the trip, a long time ago, and apparently for this one I had failed to change the month when selecting dates (which is automatically set to the current month), so I'd unwittingly booked a room for July, rather than December. Oops! Thankfully the hostel had space for me, but only a private room, which I was happy to accept rather than try looking elsewhere - at least in Vietnam a private room only cost me about ten pounds!

Flying South: To the Mekong and Beyond

Today I head to Vietnam to start the next leg of my journey. I will be flying from Hong Kong to Hanoi today, arriving at about 3.30pm (local time).