Day 5 Monday, 3/17/25, Fly to Hanoi

Up at 8 AM. We have breakfast in the hotel and we have Pad Thai, Larb Na, Bacon & Eggs and Tom Ka Gai Soup! Then it’s up to the room to pack up for we will leave Bangkok today.

We check out at noon and hire a Bolt to BKK airport. It takes a whole 2 minutes for the ride to arrive! Then it takes most of an hour to weave through traffic to the airport. We tip our driver and take our luggage into the airport and check it in. We have to go through passport control as we are flying to a different country.

The airport in Bangkok is interesting. Suvarnabhumi Airport. The decorations and displays are colorful and elaborate. This is Thailand’s biggest airport and is one of the coolest transportation hubs in the world. The facilities are excellent and there are daily flights to every continent. Around 58 million passengers travel through Suvarnabhumi Airport every year. We walk quite a ways and then have to ride a tram bus.

Our plane flight is delayed almost 2 hours. We don’t find out why. So we spend some money in the airport and eat random food.

Once on the plane, I order a glass of wine and you can see how they serve it! We are flying on Vietjet Airlines. The plane lands at 6:00 PM at Noi Bai International Airport, Sóc Sơn, Huyện Sóc Sơn, Hanoi. Hanoi, North Vietnam. It was supposed to land before 4:30 PM. But our ride to TK123 hotel is waiting for us along with other people that we will get to know as we travel with them for the next 10-12 days. We do have enough time to buy Sim Cards for our phones. It costs us 350,000 Vietnamese Dong ($14 USD) for unlimited use for a month. The conversion is 25,000 Dong equals $1.00 US.

The ride to our next hotel, TK123, takes approximately one hour. We see many colorful buildings along the way as dusk turns to night. We arrive at the hotel at 7:30 PM. Tour operator Danny is waiting for us. He will coordinate our trip for the next 12 days. We won’t see him until near the end of our trip as he is only coordinating our itinerary. We will have different Guides in each city.

We get oriented and in our room on the 10th floor. We walk a half block to a recommended restaurant, Quan An Ngon, for dinner. We have Bun cha Ha Noi and Nem cua be and I have a Bia Ha Noi. Anthony Bourdain recommended these dishes and they are very tasty!

After dinner we go back to the hotel for the night. Bangkok was 35C (95F), Hanoi is 20C (68F). The humidity is much lower also! A very pleasant change in the weather.