Day 215: Goodbye China — On to Vietnam! — Silk Path Boutique in Hanoi
It’s raining on getaway day once again. I got up and worked out while a few showers passed by.
We had a 3:50 flight to Hanoi with a 12:15 scheduled departure from the hotel. So we had time for a leisurely breakfast and a rare school session on a travel day. The Concierge helped Margaret ship off a bunch of stuff to DC.
I did school with James in the hotel bar area. We were surrounded by various Chinese in 1 on 1 business meetings.
The Pudong Airport in Shanghai is the newer of the city’s two airports. We arrived into the older Hongqiao Intl. We gave ourselves a ton of time because there is an endless series of bag checks, security checks, fingerprint and face recognition photo checks (done by a device called the “Biometrics Acquisition” machine).
As noted in yesterday’s blog we brought a bag of stuff to the airport with gifts from the Ritz that we don’t have room for. Included in that bag were the small towels with our names embroidered on them. When the kids found out we weren’t taking them with us they were not happy. Understandable. Once we told them that it’s pretty easy to order a big bath towel like this they relented and let us toss them. The rest of the stuff — Ritz lion stuffed animal backpacks and various other items — we gave to a woman who was emptying the trash cans at the airport. Hope she has some happy kids tonight.
We were all pretty hungry and while I’m sure there were countless places to eat, the area of our gate was lacking in options so we landed at… Burger King. I blame fast-food-burger-loving Margaret for leading us there and she paid for the decision soon after our meal.
It was about a 2 hour and 45 min flight on a packed, large plane (10 seats across).
It was a comfortable flight other than the fact that we were surrounded by bad breath, which reminded me that last night I had a dream that Margaret got me some mints and said my breath smelled terrible. This was anxiety driven by some combination of the amount of bad breath we’ve smelled in China and the fact that I’ve gone without deodorant for the last 3 days. Amazingly still haven’t found any.
Our travel advisors at Small World Travel have contracted with Ansova, a local tour operator. We were greeted by an Ansova airport handler in Hanoi who helped us acquire a visa, then handed us off to our guide, Khan, and our van driver.
It was Thursday night in Hanoi as we drove the 45 min to the hotel. This city is everything you expect it to be: tons of energy, traffic, chaos. Stifling humidity.
Most notable is the number of scooters and the absolute refusal to obey traffic laws. As Khan said, “The only rule is there are no rules.”
Like most guides Khan was stunned that we were traveling for an entire year. His reaction “Ah, then YOU RICH!”
Not any more! Haha.
We’re staying in the Silk Path Boutique hotel, right across the street from Lake Ho Hogan Keim. It’s a simple, clean, no-frills hotel with super friendly staff — which feels appropriate for this city. Would feel strange to be in a super lux place here. We have a nice large room with a balcony, a king, a rollaway bed and a little couch made up with sheets for James.
We ordered room service: fried rice, pasta with tomato sauce, croque monsieur (which was just a ham and cheese toastie) and two glasses of very questionable white wine. It did the trick for this hungry fam.
After dinner Margaret read a chapter of Roald Dahl’s The Witches and we put the kids to bed. We did a bit of blogging then followed them, excited for the full Hanoi experience in the morning.
Escaping The Great Firewall
It was nice to login to WiFi at the hotel. In China we had a VPN which allowed us to get to any site, but only while on our Google Fi network (and blowing through our 30 GB of monthly data). If we were on the hotel WiFi we couldn’t get on any sites that you might use all the time… Google search / maps / docs / photos, social media, Netflix, etc.
