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Vietnam & Surrounds Day 17

Day 17, Saturday, 3/29/25, The Flight Home

We wake leisurely after 8 AM. The Resort cooks breakfast for us. We pack up for the final time. We have to check out by noon. Our flight isn’t until 6:30 PM but we will go to the airport and check our luggage in. Then look for something to while the time away.

We get to the airport at 12:30. Luggage checked in by 1:30. We walk what seems to be miles through the airport and find the VIP Lounge. $30 each later and we have 3 hours of comfort with food, drinks and electricity.

So I get all my photos into the computer and start to sort them. When our time is up, we walk to the gate, what seems like more miles. We get there just in time to be ushered down stairs to the gate seating. It’s now 6:00 PM and we should board soon.

We have a 2 hour flight to Hong Kong and a 16 hour flight to LAX. Can’t wait for this torture!

I have my sleeping pills at the ready and many various snacks. My noise canceling headphones are in the top of my backpack. I’m good to go!

So we board the first plane to Hong Kong. It’s only a 2 hour flight and everything goes smoothly. We land in Hong Kong and leave the plane. We walk through the airport and the signs all tell us we must go through Security and Customs. I vaguely recall this from the beginning of our trip. But we follow the signs and go through Security and Customs. We do see some signs for “Transit” but don’t understand them. We ask a security person and are told to go through Security and Customs.

Suddenly, after following instructions, we find ourselves outside the secure part of the airport and we hold back the desire to panic. Now we have to go back through Security and Customs again and our time is running short. But we steel ourselves and go through. I get to Passport Control and I look up as Elee goes through. But my Passport isn’t accepted. Elee looks back at me. I mouth the words, “I’m screwed, it won’t scan” and she looks worried. A guard tells me I have to go through the manual line. Luckily (or unluckily), there isn’t a line. The guard takes my Passport and starts to review it. He asks me where I am traveling to and I tell him Los Angeles. I explain what happened with our misunderstanding the signs and all we are doing is changing flights. I give him my boarding pass and explain I have no time left. He seems sympathetic and understanding and processes me through.

We have traveled fairly extensively and I think other, less traveled people, will make more mistakes than we do. We don’t run, but we walk fast and it’s another mile or so to our next Gate. We arrive at the Gate just as our loading time arrives. We have made it! We have missed flights before but this one we have paid for extra leg room for the 16 hours it will take to get home. We board and Elee gets the Aisle Seat and I get the Window Seat. The Middle Seat (we call it, ‘Monkey in the Middle’) is empty.

We watch as everybody boards and stows their Carry On Bags overhead. The plane is filling up. The middle seat remains empty. Then this lovely lady walks up and identifies the middle seat as hers. She is not only very nice and pleasant, she exudes niceness. The only problem is, she weighs somewhere between 350 and 400 pounds. Now, I’m not one to judge people, I love everyone. But when she sits down, she fills her seat and she flows into one third of my and Elee’s seats. We all know that airline seats are minimum sized to begin with. Now we only have two thirds of our seats to ourselves. Good thing we can stretch out our legs!

So here’s where I came prepared. The plane takes off and we are served a meal within the first hour. After finishing that, I take a sleeping pill. Then I inflate my neck pillow and pull the airline supplied blanket over my legs. I put on my headphones. I lean against the window and close my eyes. The sleeping pill does it’s job (Thank you Dr M!) and I do fall asleep. When I wake, I see something that normally would terrify other travelers, I see on the video screen (that I had set to the ‘Flight’ channel that tracks the plane), “Flight Time Remaining, 4 Hours”. I am thrilled!

Why am I thrilled? It’s because the flight is a 16 hour flight and there’s only 4 hours left! I have done quite a few 16 to 18 hour flights and, for the most part, have stayed awake for all of them. What I saw on the flight screen told me that I stayed awake for an hour and then I must have actually slept for 10 to 11 hours! The last 4 hours are absorbed by watching a couple movies and we are served another meal about an hour before landing. Remember we only have two thirds of our seats to ourselves! I fare better than Elee as she is pushed towards the aisle and I am laying against the window. Elee says she didn’t sleep but then she tells me that the flight was only 8 hours. That tells me she got 8 hours of sleep! Good for her!

Now here’s the real kicker! We have completed a Bucket List Item that we didn’t even know we had! We take off from Hong Kong at 1:00 AM on Sunday, 3/30/25. We land in Los Angeles at 9:30 PM on Saturday, 3/29/25. We Time Traveled!!!

We deplane and bid our ‘Monkey in the Middle” lovely lady adieu. (she really was a very lovely lady!). Back in LA, we are consistently amazed at technology as the screens and cameras we walk up to, look at us and without showing any passports or paperwork, greet us and say, “Welcome home, Mr Don (insert my real name here)”!

Our great friend, Tony, is on his way to get us. I text him (I put my home Sim Card in my phone a couple hours before landing) when we land and he tells me he is 20 minutes from the airport! Perfect! We clear Customs with our Trusted Traveler status and don’t have to deal with long lines. Our ride home with our good friend is full of exhausted travel stories and promises of sharing more!

Goodnight my Blog Friends!

Vietnam & Surrounds Day 16

Day 16, Friday, 3/28/25, to Bangkok

It is time to bid farewell to the charming city of Siem Reap.

We get up today at 5:30 AM. Elee discovered last night that our flight is an hour earlier than we thought. So our travel friends make sure we get our bags first and head into the airport. The hour ride to the airport is uneventful. The architecture and decoration of the Siem Reap International Airport (REP) is beautiful. We are traveling today to Bangkok where we started this trip. The sole purpose is to get us back where we will travel home from. Little do we know what’s in store for us!

We go into the airport and there are no lines. So we get through security and still have an over an hour to go. It turns out there was no mistake of flight time. Our travel friends, Rich and Esther with their sons Dusty and John, are also on our flight. So we board on time for a one hour flight. When we land we are 25 minutes early! How does that happen?

Anyway, I order a Bolt ride and it costs $5.50 USD, including tip, to get to our hotel, the QG Resort, only 15 minutes from the airport. Try paying that in the States! At the hotel, we have to take our shoes off and put them on a rack in the lobby!

Then we kick back in the spacious room and browse the internet for things to do. Suddenly the room is shaking. Sure enough, we are feeling an earthquake that, turns out, is centered in Mandalay, Myanmar. It’s a 7.7 magnitude. The people in the hotel are scared. Being from SoCal, we just ride it out. Everything is swaying, the entire room is swaying. Ceiling lamps and fans are going crazy. I’m sitting on the bed feeling like I’m on a ship in 30 foot seas! And yes, I know what that feels like! However, having experienced dozens of earthquakes in Southern California over the decades, I never think about trying to take any photos!

We settle on finding a dinner cruise on a river after dark that includes free beer! It’s only $30 each. So our plan is to get a ride to the start area a couple hours before and check out the area. The ride arrives 1.5 hours before we need to be there and it’s a 50 minute ride. But traffic is snarled because of the earthquake. Trains are shut down and everyone is on the roads. Add to that it’s Friday night. The time comes for our Dinner Cruise to start and my GPS tells me we’re still over an hour away! So we tell the driver to turn around and take us back. We will tip him handsomely!

We cannot get a refund on our dinner cruise but we knew that in advance. So we hope to get a meal at a Marriott hotel near the airport. Our driver brings us to the Marriott and I tip him the maximum allowed. Then I have him wait and I go to an ATM and get him an additional 500 Baht cash.

We eat at the buffet at the Marriott and I am not impressed, even though it is rated 38th out of 4000 restaurants in Bangkok. But hey, it’s better than sitting in the back of a cab going nowhere! We come across some random Lotus Blossoms in the dinner restaurant. Some of the most complex and beautiful flowers in the world!

It’s time to go back to our Resort. We turn in for the night.

Reflections on the earthquake:

On March 28, 2025, a 7.7 Earthquake struck Myanmar (Burma) at approximately 1:00 PM Bangkok time. The quake was felt strongly over 650 miles away in Bangkok. You ask me how I know this? Aside from reading the news, I was in Bangkok at the time. In retrospect, I would call what I felt as a 5.5 to 6.0 Magnitude quake in Bangkok. And I was (luckily) in a single story AirBnB. The quake rolled and rolled for almost a full minute. Followed 5 or 6 minutes later by an aftershock. We had travel friends that were on a 10^th floor in the city and ran down stairs to the street where they waited over 3 hours before they got the all clear to re-enter their hotel!

Now to put a little more perspective to what I felt. Note that I was over 650 miles from the 7.7 Epicenter. And I felt quite the strong earthquake. I feel the need to mention that I live in Los Angeles County and earthquakes are no stranger to me. Over the 45 years I have lived in LA, I have lived through countless earthquakes, including the Northridge, Whittier, La Habra and other quakes that I forget the names or never knew them. The strongest quake I recall was a 7.2 and I was within 10 miles of the epicenter.

I live about 350 miles from San Francisco. Never have I recalled feeling an earthquake centered in or near San Fran. I know people who live in San Francisco. None of them, to my knowledge, have felt an earthquake occurring in the LA area. This is where this gets interesting. Note the first paragraph where I point out that I was over 650 miles from the epicenter of the Myanmar quake. Almost twice as far away as San Fran is from me. And I rocked and rolled for almost a full minute. There has not been a substantial earthquake in that region for over 30 years.

The people were in full panic mode in Thailand. I just rolled with it. Does that make me weird? I never even thought to turn the camera on my phone on. And my phone was in my hand as I was searching for activities to participate in for the rest of my day. I settled for a River Dinner Cruise and my wife and I hired a driver (Bolt) to take us there with over 2 hours to spare. Does this sound like foreshadowing to you? It should. After being in the cab for 2 plus hours, it was clear that we were still an hour plus from the boat docks.

It turns out that we underestimated the power of the aftermath of the earthquake. Rail lines were shut down. The Sky Rail was shut down. Everybody was forced into the streets. Add to that it was Friday Night! Friday Night is not much different anywhere in the world. Everybody is trying to end their week and start a party!

So the bottom line is that I live in Los Angeles (Earthquake Country) and I traveled to Thailand to experience an Earthquake! LOL! And I was twice as far from the epicenter as I have ever felt an earthquake! Even more! My friends back home told me that it was California missing me!

Goodnight all!

Vietnam & Surrounds Day 05

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.

Vietnam & Surrounds Day 04

Day 04, Sunday, March 16, Bangkok

Today we arise at 5 AM. We don’t get breakfast in the hotel because it’s not open yet. I call for a Bolt ride at 5:45 AM (Think Uber or Lyft). It is a 15 minute ride to Siam Paragon Gate 1 (Thailand used to be called, Siam”). That is the place our instructions tell us to meet our Tour Guide for the day. It is under large concrete overpasses and it is dawn. So my camera demands some attention and grabs a couple shots. The tour guide shows up at 6:15 AM and checks us in. Before she shows up, we have time to grab a bite of food from a Vendor in front, something made with chicken. Street Food. We also find that water here comes in cans! The bus arrives and we board. The bus leaves promptly at 7:00 AM. The tour guide has quite the sense of humor and everyone is entertained. It appears our group today is around 20 people. It will be a two hour ride on a comfortable bus. Everywhere there are jumbled wires on poles along the streets.

The tour Guides, Apple and Mien Phan entertain us with jokes and local trivia. For example, the average Thai earnings are 10,000 Baht per month. That’s approximately $300 USD. Per month. Let that sink in. You address someone older than you as, ’Peepee’. That is what we should call our driver. But wait, not I. Because I am older than the driver, I am told to address someone younger as, ’Nongnong’. Okay, so there it goes. Thank you for driving today, Nongnong!

We pass many salt mining farms. This is quite the business in Thailand. They pump Sea Water into the fields and let evaporation do it’s thing. Then they rake and scrape the salt into piles and ship it away. My camera whispers in my ear, a two hour ride? Come on, let me have some fun! So I acquire many photos outside from the moving bus.

We stop at Cafe Amazon for a ‘rest’ break with bathrooms. Mien Phan then gives us more trivia and jokes until we reach our first destination.

We arrive at the, “Lao Tuk Luck Floating Market” west of Bangkok. We get into (with difficulty) low floating long boats, such as the ones I commented on yesterday. Ours has what appears to be a 4 cylinder car engine mounted on a long pole, with the propeller at least 12 feet behind the boat. There are 4 or 6 tourists per boat. It’s fun riding in the narrow boats while vendors come alongside with trinkets or food. We cruise through the canals and marvel at this way of life. We even see a sign desribing the cost of a boat ride that we think we understand!

After which we climb out of the boats (with greater difficulty) and have Thai iced coffee and iced chocolate. New found friends Jonathan and Olivia from New Zealand shared their table with us and jolly conversation is had. We walk over walkways over the canals to get overviews.

Then it was back on the bus to the Mae Klong Railway Market. Perhaps you have seen videos where all the vendors pull in the awnings so the train can come through! We ‘high fived’ the passengers on the train because we were inches away! Everyone was on time or early prior to this so we got to see the train come through twice!

Then the trip back to the city was accompanied by guide Apple’s great sense of humor! Driver Peepee ( or to us ‘Nongnong’) took us to Icon Siam, a huge mall on the river. We are not up to walking a mall, especially one this big but Elee wants to see the food areas. This seems to take up most of the ground floor. But first we sit and have a glass of wine.

We then walked through the food courts and marveled at the arrays of seafood, meats and fruit and vegetables. We had been shopping for a taste of Durian all morning and the best we could find was portions for 100 Baht (about $3.50 USD) and didn’t buy any because all we wanted was a tiny taste. Then Elee spotted a vendor with tiny free samples and we said, YES!

Now let me describe Durian. It has such a foul smell that hotels ban it and charge twice as much penalty as they charge for smoking! Sure enough, the smell was rancid! And you say, “You are going to put that in your mouth?” Well, long story short, that’s exactly what we did! And the taste defied logic after smelling it. It was creamy and smooth with a vanilla, banana texture and taste! Absolutely nothing off putting about the taste at all! Now it’s time to go back to the hotel. Right outside the Icon Siam was the river and a riverboat dock. So, for 32 Baht total (0.95 USD, yes, you read that right, 95 cents!) we both got a ride to about two blocks from our hotel!

Today has been a hot one, even for Bangkok. On our walk to the Chillax, we even pass by what appears to be a restaurant food photo shoot! Our hotel has a pool on the roof with a. ‘swim-up’ bar. So guess where we spend the next couple hours? They even have a Happy Hour and get a free appetizer with two drinks! A bargain at twice the price! We chat amicably with other tourists from Holland and Bavaria.

Then back to the room to dry off and head out to find dinner. Tonight we are in search of Street Food. After a couple miles walking, We find a vendor that has Pad Thai with Chicken. Add a large beer and drink for Elee and dinner costs 320 Baht or $9.54 USD! Total. For both of us! However we are underwhelmed with the flavor but it fills us up. The large beer I got was about 38 ounces or one liter. I only drank half of it. A couple sitting next to us was drinking the same beer so I gave them the second half of the bottle!

Back to Chillax to chill and relax for the night. See you again tomorrow!

Vietnam & Surrounds Day 03

Day 03, Saturday, 3/15/25, Bangkok

It is now Saturday morning. Friday didn’t exist. We got on the plane on Thursday. We got to our hotel Saturday morning! We get up around 9 AM after arriving at 2. Our hotel is named ‘Chillax’, an appropriate name for the start of vacation! We have a complimentary breakfast in the hotel. Today we will seek out the Grand Palace, supposedly a ten minute walk from our hotel. By 10 AM it is already 33C (92 degrees F) and over 80% humidity. Street food is being prepared already by food carts parked at the curbs. Welcome to Southeast Asia! But here we are in another beautiful place in the world that we have yet to explore!

Turns out the Grand Palace is a mere 10 minutes walk. Even taking the wrong turn through Bangkok University doesn’t prevent us from finding it easily. It’s a huge complex of gorgeous temples. The currency here is the Thai Baht. One USD equals 33.5 Baht. We pay the 500 Baht (approximately 15 USD) each to enter. I also pay 200 Baht for a set of loose cover up pants as I am told that my shorts that come well past my knees are still not sufficiently long enough.

The attention to detail in this Palace/Temple complex is astounding! We even get to see a Changing of the Guard! Bright colors and golden alters and artifacts galore! After satiating our cameras inside the Palace, we find our way to the river a few blocks away. There we ride a river taxi as far as it goes and back again. I marvel at the motors I see on the small riverboats. They are 4 cylinder, 6 cylinder and even what appears to be a V-8 with an almost horizontal shaft 15 feet long to the propeller! The driver moves a bar attached to the motor so the entire motor swings from side to side to steer the craft! Turns out the end of the line for the river taxi is our stop, only two blocks from our hotel, the Chillax, where that is just what we do!

We have done all this in 35C plus degrees (95F plus degrees F). So we are tired and go back to our hotel and take naps for a couple of hours. I comment that I don’t know which I like less, 35C or -35C (-33F) that we had in Finland. The 95F here says it ‘feels like’ 107 with humidity. Just like in Singapore last year, Durian, the despised fruit, is a bigger no-no than smoking cigarettes! We are going to have to experience this at some point.

After our naps, we head out to find drinks and dinner. We find a fun street behind the hotel called, ‘Soi Ram Buttri’, that is full of street shops. Here you can buy food, clothing and drinks. The street goes for more than a mile in a ‘U’ shape.

We get a street side table and order beer and wine at a place called, ‘My House’. Their IPAs are good (and cold!). Cars and bikes drive through but are respectful of pedestrians, not like Egypt or Morocco. Fun signs assault our senses and another thing stands out. Something I first saw in South America seems to be prevalent here also. The overhead street wires are just complex jumbles that look impossible to sort out. I’d hate to be an electrician that is hired to repair a problem!

Modern busses drive through the streets carrying tourist to and fro. This is definitely a tourist destination. A lot of broken English is spoken here, even by many locals that want your tourist dollars!

We head back towards the hotel and stop at a restaurant, Hemlock, that was recommended to us by the front desk. It’s been here for over 30 years. We order authentic Indian food that includes Curried Crocodile! Nothing like we anticipated! It’s fabulous!

Then we go back to the hotel for the night. I do go up to the top floor where the hotel pool is and snap off a night shot overlooking the city!

See you tomorrow!