Vietnam – day 0
10.12. – 11.12.2024
Budapest – Guangzhou – Cam Ranh – Hanoi
Vietnam is a country I’ve heard about from Jozef about a million times. If he could move there, he already would have. So when he kept talking about it so much, I said he could take me there. We bought flights for 5 weeks, since they were cheap and life in Vietnam works out cheaper for us than in Slovakia anyway. It’s a tight fit, since we decided at the last minute to also go to Paraguay, so we were home for about 10 days total. When I floated the idea of not going to Vietnam, Jozef nearly had a heart attack. He’s really looking forward to it. We’ve barely planned anything. We just have a few points marked on the map, which I started looking at a week before we left, just so I’d know what cities are where.
Before we leave I feel pretty neutral, I pack the day before, it takes about an hour, and I don’t have any expectations.
The last few days we’ve been visiting people, having beers, saying goodbyes. We fly out of Budapest on Tuesday at 11:55am. In theory we could make it by train, but if anything went wrong, we’d miss the flight. Luckily, brother-in-law Milan doesn’t start work until the afternoon, so he drives us. We leave Partizánske at 5:30am and put on a podcast about minimalism in travel. The drive goes fairly fast. In Hungary I have to navigate so we avoid the toll highway. We slip onto it once, but only for a short stretch, hopefully there’s no camera there yet. We’re at the airport at 9:15am. We check in at the counter. We ask for seats next to each other, and we get them for both flights. Then security, which we clear fast, and passport control too. Jozef buys a Pilsner and does a bit of work while he has time. It all goes by quickly and we’re already boarding the China Southern Airlines flight. I’m pretty tired, so I fall asleep right away for about an hour and a half, and then they bring us food, chicken with rice and vegetables, some salad, fruit and a little cake. We have a beer with it and I put on The Help, one of my favorite films. Then, surprisingly, I watch films I hadn’t seen before, Hidden Figures and Little Miss Sunshine, and I’m happy with the picks, would recommend. They bring us food again, but no more beer. I have chicken again, though it’s not very good this time, Jozef has fish, which is better. Our seatmate even gives Jozef his salad, he probably looked like he’d eat more. I’m getting pretty sleepy, so I try to get comfortable. I put on Harry Potter in Spanish as background noise. I doze off a bit, but then we start descending. We land in Guangzhou at 5am local time (a 7-hour time difference). It’s a huge airport, just moving between planes takes 15 minutes, and then another 10 minutes on a bus, which smells terrible. We go for transit and go through passport control and security again. They’re fairly pedantic and people who don’t have their things ready get their whole bags rummaged through. We don’t have much time, so we just find our gate and finish off all our bread rolls from home. Then we take a brutally air-conditioned bus to the plane. I fall asleep right away and only wake up for food. I’m not even that hungry, but I have the chicken noodles anyway. To get to the airport we need to go through immigration, we’d done our visas online. We exchange some money at one of five exchange offices lined up next to each other. It’s funny how each one calls out to us, even though they all offer the same rate. It’s pleasantly warm in Cam Ranh, but pouring rain, so we scrap our plan to walk on the beach. Instead we lay out on padded benches and go to sleep. We sleep for two hours and then go look around the nearby shops. Jozef has a baguette, banh mi, and I have iced coffee. One more security check and we’ve got our last two-hour flight ahead with the budget airline Bamboo Airways. I sleep through this one entirely too. In Hanoi, taxi drivers stop us at the airport, but we know we’re taking the bus. We seem to have just missed one, since we wait over half an hour. It finally comes, we pay 45000 dong per person, and get off in the center half an hour later. Our accommodation’s fairly close, so we go drop off our things right away. Reviews were mixed, so we’re not sure what to expect. It’s called Hidden Gem, and it really is hidden, but we find it by the hause number. It’s actually a room at a woman’s home, so I show her the booking and pay. We just set our things down and head into the city. Jozef’s got a restaurant picked out for bun cha. It’s fairly full, so we sit upstairs. We share a bun cha combo and spring rolls, and get a heaped plate of salad with it. It’s pretty good, we’d just expected a bit more spice. Then we go for a walk around evening Hanoi. Locals exercise or dance in groups. Jozef wants to go for a beer somewhere, so he finds a local place, where they pour us 2 liters of beer into a jug. We settle right by a baguette stall, on tiny stools. Jozef’s very happy. We split one more baguette in half, and Cherry, a restaurant guide, approaches us saying to message her if we need anything. A proper slump hits us, but we still want to check out “beer street.” Jozef sat there having a beer with locals 8 years ago, on small plastic stools. Now it’s bar after bar, each blasting different loud music. You can’t even move through it. It’s pretty rough here, exactly the kind of place we try to avoid. Ugh, we push through to the end and go get some sleep instead.
