Goodnight Hanoi (with apologies to Billy Joel)

So with a hint of sadness (and an awful lot of sweatiness) we bade a fond farewell to Hanoi and Vietnam, and jumped on the plane to Bangkok.  Being Air Asia, the baggage allowance was a mere 15kg – always handy when you’ve been buying small, lightweight items like suits and shoes, I find.

Thanks to some judicious turfing of stuff and some slightly overloaded carry-on, we both avoided excess baggage fees.  Unlike, it seemed, everybody else in the queue in front of us.  My god there were some unhappy people at Hanoi International Airport that day.  The couple that were 20kg over the limit, for example.  Or the three Italian women that appeared to be having a competition to see who could scream the loudest at the lady at check-in.  Smart, real smart.  I’m sure it made her much more predisposed to waive any of their fees.

After helping a young guy practice his English, and letting the guards at security have a play with my binoculars (they were very impressed with them for some reason – so much so that one of them wanted to buy them off me, before his mate told him that wasn’t allowed!), we took the two hour flight to Bangkok.  Not before I spotted a rather amusing charity donation box that seemed to strike a chord for some reason…

We didn’t really see any of Bangkok at all, since we were only there overnight with morning flights the next day (me to Finland, Dean to Phuket).  Stayed at a hotel near the airport and proceeded to get drunk and enjoy a rather good meal at the nearby restaurant.  Back to the airport the next morning suffering the after-effects of the night before (which turned to be something a bit more serious,  unfortunately, given I’m still getting over it 5 days later, but anyway), then bid farewell to Deano and enjoyed a mediocre 10 hour Finnair flight to Helsinki.  Took the bus into the city, humped my pack for a while finding my hotel, had a shower and hit the sack.  The hotel’ was a funny sort of a thing, it’s totally unstaffed except for cleaners, so you’re given a room number and code when you make the booking, and figure the rest out yourself.  A great theory, except for the fact that the front door requires you to swipe your credit card to get in.  Again, not a problem – until the system didn’t like either  of my credit cards (or either of my debit cards, come to that).  Brilliant.  I love having to hang around waiting for someone else to come out before I can get into the hotel that I’m paying 60 euros a night for.  But anyway, that aside, the hotel was clean and surprisingly spacious, and very central, so it’s hard to complain too loudly.  Got up early (not hard to do when your body clock is somewhere over India) and wandered round the city for the morning.  It’s a really nice and quite attractive place, and the weather even held out until close to  lunchtime when it was time to check out and head back to the airport.  Just in case, you know, I hadn’t spent enough time in them of late.  And off to Heathrow I went…