It's not the destination, it's the journey

Traffic lights as suggestions, street signs and lines for decoration, the constant honking of horns of anything other than annoyance.  The traffic in Hanoi just works.  If you want to cross the street, you just steel yourself to the task and go and the vehicles will miraculously miss you no matter where they come from or where they go.  As another traveller said: "you can't get mad when there are no rules."  As long as all the vehicles and pedestrians alike understand the one rule of no rules, then no one gets angry, no one is wrong, and it just works.

With all of that in mind, then what happened on our way back to Hanoi from Halong Bay should not have come as a surprise--and I guess it wasn't; it was just simply incredible.

Having complete about 3/4 of our 3 hours bus journey, all of us on the bus were eager to get back to the city and disembark at our respective hotels.  We had been travelling at a good clip along the highway when our bus suddenly slowed; traffic.

We inched along until we came upon the source of the slow down - a bus like ours appeared ahead, sideways across the lanes of the highway.

     "What's wrong?"
     "What happened?"
     "Was it hit?"
     "Did it spin out?"

Our questions were immediately answered as the bus began to reverse and then move forward to complete its U-TURN on the highway.  Amazingly, the horns of the other vehicles on the highway were quiet save for the motorbikes that were letting you know they were there skootching by you in the meantime.  When the bus was out of our way, we continue on past it to where the high was was a little clearance - only to begin to make our own u-turn.

     "What's going on?"
     "Festival."

Apparently a festival in town was either blocking traffic or causing traffic (maybe he meant "parade") and the highway was impassable ahead.  A glance out the front window seemed to corroborate this story, but it was hard to say.  Nevertheless, we were turning around.

Our own crazy highway manoeuvre was also accompanied by minimal honking from the surrounding vehicles who instead did their best to give us room to move (?!).  Once we'd completed our turn and were now facing traffic head-on, we made no effort to move to the shoulder to drive back to the last exit--oh no, we just drove straight down the middle (I suppose the motorcycles were using the shoulder anyway, so down the centre was safer).

You could suppose that once we'd made it off the highway, our highway hijinx manoeuvres would be over, but they weren't.  Coming of the highway, we encountered even more traffic; our guide AND driver disembarked to find out why.  Apparently via this exit there was only one route into the city and for some reason, there were giant concrete pipes in the way of the road access.

But that didn't mean we couldn't get by.

When we reached the road block (which took a while because our driver kept getting out to give advice or to direct other drivers), we could see exactly what the problem was and what the Vietnamese solution was going to be.

The giant pipes that were blocking the roadway (they were big enough to walk through) had been placed so that there was one in each lane of the 2-lane road, but there was a gap in the middle.  When give the opportunity, motorbikes would whiz their way through no problem.  Even mid-sized cars and pick-up trucks could make the squeeze and they were chaotically, yet civilly taking their turns to pass through one at a time from either direction.

However, our mini-bus and the full-sized tour buses following us were too big to make it past those pipes.  The solution: jump the curb and go around.  Simple enough, except for the fact that just outside of the pipe was a road sign solidly cemented in place that still made this route impossibly narrow and passing outside of the road sign was out of the question due to a drop off and ditch below.  But, as with all Vietnamese traffic, no matter how impossible it seemed, it was just going to work.

And so, we lost our driver a number of times more as he went to help guide or push other buses through the new route.  Once, we lost him so that he could go and pull on the road sign in order to try tot give another driver the 2 more inches of clearance he needed.  When it finally came to be our turn, we all had to disembark and watch (and video) from the far side of the ditch as our ride carefully climbed the curb and inched by between sign and pipe with zero room to spare.

After our driver made it through, there was little time for celebration as we were quickly ushered back on board and we continued ambling our way back into the city.  Besides, there was no need to celebrate what was just part of an ordinary day anyway, right?