Fast Forward Flight

Rita & Jan in front of one (of the many) Tet photo backgrounds set up in the city.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, arrangements for part of our trip were made by Intrepid tours. The last couple days we were traveling as a group of 13, several of whom had been on Intrepid through Cambodia before arriving in HCMC. Our Vietnamese tour leader is Phi (pronounced Fee), whose home is near Hoi An. While traveling, it’s been great to hear his explanations of the area and history.

While we’ve seen some great things being here during the lead-up to Tet, there’s also a downside. During this time most people travel home to be near family, so millions of people flock to trains, busses and airports. Intrepid warned that there may be some difficulties traveling during Tet and, sure enough, changed the itinerary less than 2 weeks before we left Minnesota. They intended to put us on day busses (instead of night trains) from HCMC to Na Trang and Na Trang to Da Nang.

We didn’t like the idea of losing two days of our trip to travel and having 20 hours sitting on a bus instead of sleeping on a train, so we worked fast and hard to book seats on a flight from HCMC to Da Nang on our own. We got the last ones on Jetstar, since nearly all flights were booked solid. That meant the rest of the group would go on to Na Trang without us, but we got more time in Hoi An and Da Nang, which was one of the reasons for our trip.