New Year’s Eve: Jan 30th
The streets of Hoi An were a ghost town as the airport shuttle bus pulled out of the town I’d grown to love and into the city of DaNang for my flight to Hanoi. The highway is deserted, as most families have left to go back to their relatives in the countryside. Everywhere is shuttered. The airport, a modern metropolis, has an air of anticipation, the Vietnamese travellers are loaded with gifts, dressed in their best clothes, smiling broadly and wishing me ‘good fortune’.
The flight was on time, a miracle, and flew low over the city and the spectacular ravine dividing DaNang from Hue.
The original hotel I booked was a disappointment, but the holiday mood had affected the staff, and, bless them, seeing me concern (the room was at street level, which worries me) they escorted me over the road to their sister hotel, a much more luxurious place, where I was soon happily settled in an enormous deluxe triple room all to myself, he he…there is even a bath though I have to shower first to clean myself before I can use it-a few minutes outside in Vietnam is enough to cover everything in dust.
Too exhausted to join the throng heading for the lake, I listened to the fireworks and watched the show live on my cable TV-just like New Year’s Eve at home!!
The streets of Hoi An were a ghost town as the airport shuttle bus pulled out of the town I’d grown to love and into the city of DaNang for my flight to Hanoi. The highway is deserted, as most families have left to go back to their relatives in the countryside. Everywhere is shuttered. The airport, a modern metropolis, has an air of anticipation, the Vietnamese travellers are loaded with gifts, dressed in their best clothes, smiling broadly and wishing me ‘good fortune’.
The flight was on time, a miracle, and flew low over the city and the spectacular ravine dividing DaNang from Hue.
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| DaNang and Hue |
The gentlemen next to me spent the entire flight plucking his face with
tweezers, it’s the culture here to have no facial hair, he obviously
thought I was a monkey but was too polite to say!
Descending into Hanoi in the evening sunset I was driven frantically through the darkening streets by a driver intent on getting home for Tet, the Lunar New Year festival which begins at midnight tonight at the start of the Year of the Horse 2014 with a massive firework display at the city lake.
Descending into Hanoi in the evening sunset I was driven frantically through the darkening streets by a driver intent on getting home for Tet, the Lunar New Year festival which begins at midnight tonight at the start of the Year of the Horse 2014 with a massive firework display at the city lake.
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| Approach to Hanoi at sunset |
Too exhausted to join the throng heading for the lake, I listened to the fireworks and watched the show live on my cable TV-just like New Year’s Eve at home!!
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