Our final stop on the tour was the capital city of Vietnam, Hanoi. We have been before; it is our favorite city in Vietnam. We drove from Ha Long Bay to Hanoi, on the highway this time, but it still took over two hours. We had a rest stop along the way and bought some snacks. I was looking for gouteʹ crackers, a salty and sweet combination of deliciousness that we had fallen in love with on our previous trips to Vietnam. Sadly, we could not find any but did buy some peanut brittle encased in rice crackers and something that resembled rice crispy bars with bits of dried fruit. It turns out that the peanut brittle had ginger in it. It was surprisingly spicy and quite tasty! The rice crispy bars were pretty bland.

Our hotel, the Thang Long Opera House, was located near Hoan Kiem Lake, one of our favorite places to hang out in Hanoi. It was on the opposite side of the lake than the old quarter, which is where we stayed on previous visits. We had the evening free to reacquaint ourselves with the city. The following day would be a bus tour. We opted to not do the bus tour. We prefer DIY and since we had visited all of the spots on the tour, decided to enjoy the time without being part of the group.

One little hiccup that we experienced was that our phones did not work in Vietnam. I tried to get roaming through my Thai phone provider, but it did not work. That made getting around a bit challenging since we rely on Google maps to get us from point a to point b when we travel. We were able to navigate fairly well once we got our bearings, but it would’ve been much easier with Google Gertie, as we call her, to tell us where to turn!

We took the HOHO bus tour around the city but didn’t “hop off” at all. Instead, we made it a relaxing day and decided to return to Hanoi in a few months when we were not exhausted from being on a tour for eleven days. I took a few pictures along the route.

The rest of the tour group attended a water puppet theater performance (we’ve been before) and a farewell dinner. We like to eat early, and the group dinners are scheduled late (for us), so we skipped the dinner, too. The following morning, everyone headed to the airport to catch very long flights back to the United States. We felt fortunate that our flight was only 1.5 hours long to get back to our home in Chiang Mai.