Journey to Ho Chi Minh City

July 19th 2008

After the most horrendous journey I have ever undertaken I am currently lying on my bed in Luan Vu guesthouse in a very busy street in district one, Ho Chi Minh City. It is a very cute little guesthouse and the manager kindly swapped our reserved fourth floor room to one on the first floor after observing our disheveled state and the size of our luggage. There was no way that either of us were getting to the fourth floor with or without the baggage. The will had been thoroughly beaten out of us by 20 hours of air travel!

Twenty hours of pain, suffering and torture. My travel partner, Arpa, who is prone to succumbing to terrible travel sickness, was lulled into a false sense of security after purchasing a so called anti-emetic (active ingredient- domperidone. Oh, yes. We asked). And I was fooled into believing that half a tablet of diazepam was enough to quell the horrible flux of emotion and nausea that threaten me with every whiff of that peculiar ‘airplane smell’. Urgh! Our 12.35pm take-off was delayed by an hour after we boarded the plane. So we just sat there wait and breathing it all in for a whole hour, before the journey even began. By the time the plane started to taxi, we were ready to get off!

If there was anything that promised some sort of relief during that first long and arduous 11 hour flight, it was the promise of at least one hour of rest in Hong Kong as we wait for our connecting flight to Ho Chi Minh. A chance for sight-seeing (around the airport and its surrounds) with photographs aplenty. It did not occur to us (or maybe we didn’t want to acknowledge it) during the first flight that because we had been delayed for an hour, they had just eaten up our hour-long sojourn in Hong Kong!

We landed in Hong Kong, at 8.10am (their time) and strolled at our own pace towards passport control and hand luggage search; put our trolley cases into the carousel and walked through the metal detector. No beep, just a beckon to me by the female guard.
‘Yes?’ I asked innocently hoping they would all just go away.
‘This your bag?’ She asked.
‘Yes, it is’. ‘Do you have liquid in here?’ She said, moving to open it. ‘Oh, no,’ I said as I scrambled for the solitary key in my jeans pocket. ‘Open, please’. ‘Yes, yes’ I responded and popped the lock.

I opened it and I and the nice lady looked through it. I knew I didn’t have anything liquid in it until she pulled out my Olay face cream 250ml and said ‘This too much. 100ml only’ ‘Oh,’ said I a baffled looked on my face as she went on to pull my toothpaste and face wash out as well. ‘Only 100ml’ she kept saying. ‘Can I empty them out then’ I asked. ‘Do you have small bottle?’ Why on earth would I be carrying several empty 100ml bottles? And how do I squeeze toothpaste into them and hope to use it in future. As she watched me trying to wrangle my out of losing my essential toiletries, a more senior female custom’s official came up and shooed the younger (read nicer) lady away. ‘This too much,’ she said, holding all three items in one hand. ‘You have small bottle?’ I shook my head. ‘Then you can’t take’. I nodded my head. She nodded back, turned around and emptied her laden hand into a large bin (probably containing other confiscated stuff from suckers like me). Case closed. I quietly seethed as I locked my back and proceeded to where Arpa was sitting on her hand luggage looking totally bedraggled and fed up. We started to make our way to Gate 67.

Arpa was looking bedraggled as I said previously because she had vomited no less than 4 times on the previous flight and had not been able to keep anything down. I tried my best to be a good travel partner, but everytime I opened my eyes to help her ask for more tissues or another paper bag, I felt so dizzy that I was in danger of being more of a hinderance than help.

Making our way to the next flight took way longer than we expected. It was so far away, that getting there involved boarding an interconnecting tube/train. By the time we got to the concourse leading directly to gate 67, we were met by an air hostess carrying placards with our flight number on it. 'Is this you' she asked. 'Yes' Arpa and I replied simulataneously. 'Then hurry, hurry' she said as she started to talk into her walkie-talkie. Before we were out of airshot we could see another air hostess in the distance gesticulating towards us. So we started to run. All the way past gates 62, 63, 64, 65, 66. As we got to 67, there were no other passengers boarding. The air hostess that had being doing the hand movements shouted our surnames out and as we nodded in affirmation, too out of breath to vocalise a reply, they guy at the desk reahed out to get our boarding pass and another airline staff ran into the plane to ask them to wait while we boarded. We were the only two they were waiting for! So before we even sat down, te plane started to taxi.

Dripping with sweat; panting for breath and still dizzy from the last flight we took our seats and the plane took of for it's 2 and a half hour journey to Ho Chi Minh City.