Oh where to even begin! The weekend trip began at 01:00 (yes that is 1 am for you non-military folk) with our driver taking us to Da Nang in our Magical Mystery Tour vans so we could fly out at 06:00. The idea was to sleep in the van. Ha-ha, that was a joke! Apparently we had forgotten that the road from Hue to Da Nang is through a mountain pass and lots of little villages. There was no sleeping at all. We arrive to the Da Nang airport at 03:00. Now, you may be asking why did we leave at 01:00 for a 2-hour trip? We had to be through the tunnel near Da Nang by 03:00 as it shuts down for an hour then. So we arrive to the Da Nang airport at 03:00 and were told by a guard that the airport was closed, and he pointed to the next resting/sleeping location – benches outside the airport. We put our bags under our heads to enjoy sleeping underneath all the stars, or as The Le (accent over e) put it “the 10,000 star hotel”.
We moved inside at 04:00 to rest in a few chairs, and sometime between 04:00 and 04:40, approximately 600 people flooded the airport (ok maybe not that many). The scene though was as if Justin Beiber walked into an all-girls high school convention (Kit’s been listening to a lot of Beiber recently). We somehow made it through the ticket counter, security and to the shuttle to take us 20 yards to the plane.

After arriving in Hanoi, we caught a taxi for the 45-minute trip to the tourism office where we were to meet up with the tour group. Realized quickly that the reason this is a 45 minute drive is that the average speed is 15 mph. This is largely due to the fact that there are NO traffic rules! Somehow we did make it to the tour office by 8:30, and even had time to grab a pork sausage Bun from the street vendor:

We made several stops in the tour van to pick up different people. Our fellow travelers were diverse and appeared to be a fun group – an Aussie couple, and French Canadian couple in medical school, and book editor from Scotland to name a few. After a 3.5-hour bus trip from Hanoi, sustaining several C-spine compression fractures, we arrived at Halong Bay.
Can I just say “Whoa”?! I was honestly expecting a little known, preserved nature area (a la Milford & Doubtful Sound), instead we had arrived at an Indochina Disneyland. Our guide even had a flag for us to follow him. I kid you not.
Once we followed the blue and yellow flag through the mass of people, we took a small junk (boat) to our real boat. Our boat was very nice with a top deck, dining area and rooms complete with private bathrooms. After having been to many different countries with many different interpretations of this, one truly begins to appreciate the importance of an en suite restroom.