Well, that was one of the more stressful days of our trip. Starting out when we took the tuk tuk to the address suggested by Booking.com, arriving with just seven minutes to spare before departure time, only to find it didn’t exist. “Go to Giant Ibis by the market – NOW!” commanded Virle (she can be so forceful), whereupon we crawled through the heavy Phnom Penh traffic as the minutes ticked away and the appointed time came….and went. And us sitting there with a plane to catch, hundreds of miles away, and no Plan B
Five minutes late, we arrived at the office, and were immensely relieved to see a bus waiting by the kerb. “Pull up in front of the bus so it can’t drive away!” He did, and I clambered out. “Saigon?” I questioned. “Yes, Saigon,” he said with a smile. Phew.
Then it was just a question of sitting on the bus for the next seven hours, while we crawled our way up to Saigon. Crossing the border, by the way, was quick and painless – no visas required, and the formalities felt very much like, well, formalities. We arrived late of course, but with plenty of time to spare, and decided to go for a wander and find a sim card, some cash, and a meal.
The sim card came first, and turned out to be a somewhat surreal experience, involving what seemed to be an awful lot of tippy-tapping, form-filling, and – at one point, our saleswoman’s insistence that I take a photograph of her phone.
God knows what that was all about. Anyway, eventually we emerged with sim installed, which enabled us to search for a bank. Which, found, then rejected my card! After all the madness when it did the same when we got to Cambodia – a saga which ended only after I wrote to the CEO of First Direct (“Sorry Chris, but that’s dumb….just dumb.”) – it now seemed they’d done it AGAIN! Fortunately Virle’s TSB card proved more reliable.
That achieved, we found a corner cafe, where we had a couple of very tasty bowls of pho before retrieving our bags from Giant Ibis and heading to the nearby bus station. Google said the next bus was at 7.15. It was now 6.40. We must have just missed one…again. Damn. We waited patiently, V getting a tad fraught as the appointed time approached…came..and passed.
I asked the rude, grumpy man in the booth when the next bus to the airport was. He gestured angrily up in the air, jabbering at me in Vietnamese and looking at me like I’d insulted him. I eventually realised he was pointing at a handwritten list, sellotaped to the window. I looked at it. There was no 7.15 bus indicated. But there was a 6.55. I returned to the man, having photographed the list, pointing at it and gesturing “6.55?” He grunted, shrugged his shoulders, pointed to the next on the list: “7.45”. “But what about this one?” I whimpered.
He called a colleague, who came over. I had much the same encounter with her, before she confirmed that the 6.55 had been cancelled, and the next one was 7.45. “Why didn’t he tell us when we arrived?” said Virle. “I don’t know,” said I. And off we went to get a Grab cab, which took us to the airport swiftly, comfortably, and for a bit over three quid. Sometimes, trying to do the backpacker thing really is more trouble than it’s worth.
At the airport, everything went smoothly, other than being summoned over by security after our take-on bag had been through the x-ray. “Knife,” said the man. Oh, shit. The Swiss Army knife we keep in the top of that bag. Forgotten all about it. The man was most apologetic, but there was nothing to be done: into the bin it went. *sob*.
And so on to the plane. Which was for some reason swirling with mist, like a capacious and rather chilly sauna. Where we sat on the tarmac as 9 o’ clock approached, and arrived, and departed. Unlike us. “This is actually not funny,” said Virle. “The timing was already getting a bit tight, with the scheduled delay. The hotel said check in is until midnight. After that…?”
Eventually, shortly after half past, we took off. And had an uneventful couple of hours. Other than the in-flight entertainment, which proved, well, particularly for an internal Vietnam flight, somewhat surreal:
By the time we landed, we were upwards of 45 minutes behind schedule, and were getting more than a bit edgy. For once, mercifully, our bags were among the first to emerge, and we scampered out to find a man holding up a sign with Virle’s name on it. Thank God! We had thought he might have given up on us, and we really did have no time to spare, to say the least.
And so into Hanoi, our way littered with roadworks and other encumbrances, as the precious minutes ticked away. At midnight, we were within range, but… Oh, and I forgot to mention: the sim card we’d got in Saigon had decided to stop working, which meant no way to call ahead – and no internet in the event we needed to start finding alternative accommodation in the early hours, after almost 16 hours on the go.
Ten past the witching hour, and our cab pulled up outside the hotel, whose glass frontage allowed us to see a man sitting at the front desk. A very nice man, who welcomed us to Hanoi with a cheerful smile.
Please God, no more days like that.