SINGAPORE TO HANOI TO LUANG PRABANG

 First of all my calculations were correct! It took about 3 hours & 20 minutes to fly across Indochina from Singapore. BTW, Hanoi is really N-NE from Singapore, not NE!

As Vietnam Airlines airbus was towed out of the gates, Singapore was crying. Actually it was raining, but Mum always used to say when we left Sydney in the rain it was crying because we were leaving. 

  

I tried to be creative with my photography here .. Mum has a photo taken from inside a taxi in Saigon with the rain drops being a curtain to the xeom drives in their rain ponchos. 

Landing into Hanoi

 Hanoi was coated in a thick layer of low cloud. We didn't see the ground because of the cotton candy water vapour until we were about 500 meters from landing. 

The Red River is in Hanoi, and the Red River delta is a bit like the Mekong delta because it provides rich, fertile soil. You can see the vivid greens in the photo, AND the brown murky river. The last time I was in Hanoi was with Bea and the Stingrays teams competing at the UNIS swim meet. 

 As always, well mostly, the plane was parked on the tarmac so it was the stairs and bus to the terminal. 

 We waited for 3 hours at the cold, gloomy, sterile Hanoi airport. Then after the boarding call - which was really a CALL (the woman shouted to the passengers that the Lao Airlines fight was leaving) we got into a bus with about 15 other passengers and drove to our tiny turboprop plane. We only had to walk up FOUR steps to get into the plane. 

This doesn't need a caption!

Leaving Hanoi

The flight over to Laos took about 50 minutes. We couldn't see any lights until we were about to land into Luang Prabang, and this time it wasn't because of low cloud. It was because there aren't many towns in Laos. I read over 80% of the population live in rural areas, and I'm guessing without electricity!

The airport terminal looked deserted. There wasn't a bus to take us there, we just had to walk about 20 metres, where there were only TWO immigration staff - and NO ONE else in the terminal.  One conveyor belt and one taxi. It took 7 minutes to arrive at our guesthouse. 

BTW - the internet is really really really really SLOW. This photos in this post took more than 3 hours to upload.!