This is it. The Finale of VN2023, which took more than 20 days in the real world and about 10 months of writing to finish. We’re pretty much done with the travel now, so the last few days will only consist of hanging with relatives, maybe visiting one or two more attractions, hanging with Mia and Koia, and sitting on my computer.
We woke up in Ha Long Bay one last time and took one last good look at the view as we started to pack up. Our parents let us play around in the pool, where we had an amazing view of the city and afterwards it was time to head back- we were going back to Hanoi that day and then taking a flight back to our grandparents’ house in Saigon, where we would stay the next few days (Not actually a flight straight to their house for obvious reasons)
It took us the whole morning to drive to Hanoi, but we did get one last good look at the city. Since it was Sunday that day, we didn’t have many options for lunch, so we decided to get… KFC. Which just so happens to be Casey’s second favorite restaurant back in America, rivalled only by Chic-fil-A. Casey was pretty over the top with this, and I was okay with this as well. It was my first time eating fast food in a while (A month at least) and Casey’s first time in probably not that long since he is really into junk food.
After getting into the airport, we finally said goodbye to the driver who had been with us for over a week, ever since Part 14 of the trip, which felt like years ago. He went back to his home in Sapa.
We headed on a flight back to Hanoi where we all started to settle in, as we waited for the flight Casey found a massage chair, Mia, Koia, and I chilled out, I suddenly started asking our parents if we could go to the North Korean DMZ someday (We had discussions about visiting Korea and Japan next year, which as I write this I am leaving for Japan in 3 days. Korea will have to be another time, sadly.) and Casey really wanted our dad to get him this rapper’s diamond teeth that he thought looked cool.
The flight back to Saigon was really quiet- we didn’t have much to do afterwards. I just sat three and looked through my mom’s things (I don’t know either, that’s just what I remember) and there wasn’t much to see outside the window since it was quickly turning to night. We arrived back in Saigon under a lot of turbulence- this was probably the most turbulence I’d ever had in a single flight, and it got even worse when wewere in Saigon – it was pouring hard. There was so much rain in the area that we weren’t allowed to exit the plane after it had landed- it was deemed too dangerous, and they were probably right- we had to stay in the plane for another ten minutes or so. When we came out and got our stuff, everyone wanted food again- we hadn’t eaten since that KFC’s meal in Hanoi and so they decided to give us another portion of Western Food since we didn’t really have anything else at the time. I just got the old burger that I was used to from the states, while everyone else got rice for some reason. It has been a really long time since I’ve eaten western food twice in a day. Even now, I don’t eat fast food that often.
The last three or four days of the trip were pretty quiet- not much happened, to be frank, so I’ll speed through all of it until we get to the last flight. The majority of the days, we were a bit too tired to do anything, but stuff still did happen.
First, we got a collection of South Vietnamese stamps from an earlier time period in its history from one of my parents’ friends. We went to hang out with my dad’s friends and their kids a lot, sometimes playing hide and seek on the river with them. We hung out with Mia and Koia a few more times, although we weren’t together every hour anymore since they had to get back to their studies. We ate dinner at a riverside restaurant once before going to Bitexco Tower, a really popular mall where Casey and I got Ice Cream (I don’t remember this too well sorry) and later on they came over because we had planned to make an animated documentary about our travels, which was… uh… I only edited 3 minutes of it and kinda forgot about it later on. We’d started working on the script in Hanoi waiting for the flight. I also proposed a trip where we took Mia, Koia, and the rest of our family around the states in a future year, which they both loved. We originally planned to have it in the summer of 2024, but as of now it’s not going to happen as we already have a trip to Japan in place. Still, we’ve discussed them coming over numerous times. We aren’t sure when yet, but we are certainly excited to show them America sometime.
The last flight back was from Saigon to Tokyo, then Tokyo to San Diego. The flights were really quiet and tiring because we’d been on so many crazy adventures recently. I didn’t take a single picture in Japan, but it’s fine (I’ll be in Japan in one week anyway). One last interesting thing happened on the flight back to our home in San Diego, and I wouldn’t notice this until a few days later.
One of my friends, Tyler, was actually on that flight as well! I didn’t realize it because he was in First class and I wasn’t, but at the airport I thought I’d recognized him and I was about to go up to him and ask him if he was who I thought he was. It later turned out that another one of friends was also on that flight- what a coincidence! I haven’t had many incidents where I found someone I knew on vacation with me at the same time (I think it’s happened twice in my life so far). One of them had reached Japan as a layover from their trip to India, Tyler had visited Japan with his family.
So yeah, that wraps up our VN2023 trip series. Japan2024 will be coming really soon…
Cody Nguyen