Hong Kong Day 5 – Goodbye lunch and flight to Hanoi

Gotta love the trams

Our final morning was spent lazily packing and not checking out until the last possible moment. We dropped our bags off at the station left baggage and met the kids for a farewell lunch and tram ride through the city.

We (well, mainly the girls) got a bit teary as we said our goodbyes and hopped in a taxi and headed back to the station for the airport. Rather amazingly, you can check your baggage for any flight at the HK MTR station and they whisk it to the airport for you – leaving you a bit more free time and no queuing once you get there… or so we thought! We neglected to factor in the time it takes to clear passport control and the security screening with our carry-on, then the time it took to find our gate! After pleading with a few officials to jump the queues – and running to the gate we were the last ones on the bus to the plane!

Despite our repeated near misses – and actual misses we never seem to learn, so it was with great relief that we boarded our plane, although we even fucked that one up by getting into the wrong seats and having to move which caused much annoyance to the inconvenienced couple we displaced.

The flight was fine for the first hour, we managed to watch some TV on the laptop – then the turbulence kicked in as we started our descent. As luck would have it, we were flying on the outskirts of a Typhoon which was making landfall

 a few hundred km south of Hanoi – so although the flight didn’t get cancelled, it was bumpy as hell. Coming into land the plane swayed from left to right and it was a definite relief to touch down safely, albeit in the pouring rain.

The next drama of our travels was solely my fault. I forgot to leave $50usd in cash in my hand luggage for the visa payment on arrival – and we only had $39. To get to your checked bags, you need to get through passport control with your visa stamp – a rather tricky situation, especially with a language barrier and dealing with guys dressed in military outfits who had our passports. They thought we ONLY had $39 – and despite repeated attempts, we got nowhere and were stuck.

After a very stressful half an hour waiting around whilst some phonecalls were made – we eventually spoke to a guy who understood that we did in fact have the money in our bags, which you could literally see from passport control so he lead me to them – we got our cash, got the visas and made it into Vietnam – barely.

These guys were amazing at keepy-up with the shuttlecock,
passing their Sunday away downtown.

We met our driver, and headed for our homestay on the outskirts of Hanoi city. It was hammering it down with rain, but they came and met us at the taxi with umbrellas and helped us with our bags into their house where we headed straight to our room and collapsed out of relief and amazement that we’d made it.