Or – There’s An Upside to the Downside and Not Just with Elevators, Escalators and Stairs
Good things come out of some unlikely situations.
One of those being not remembering to check the visa situation for a country when I recently booked flights to go from Tokyo to Hoi An (Da Nang Aiport) via Hong Kong (the indirect flight was just so I could make use of a points upgrade given my airline membership and wouldn’t add a significant amount of time to my journey).
I flicked through my passport as I was putting it in my handbag on the evening of my flight and found it had a visa for Vietnam already stuck inside. The issuing country on my Vietnam visa read “Hong Kong” which is where I was living when I last traveled there.
As an Australian, I’m fortunate that on those rare occasions where I require a visa, I can usually apply and receive them on arrival.
This is not the case for Vietnam.
Frantic internet searching revealed that if I enter the country with a letter of approval from an agency in Vietnam, a passport photo, a completed form and USD25, I can then receive a visa on arrival. Otherwise, no chance. The fastest a letter could be obtained is four hours. I applied online, followed up with a phone call and was advised that it would be ready by 11am HK time the following day. My connecting flight was at 7.55am.
There was a problem.
Outsourcing to some friends to search for flights while I prepared to go to the airport, hoping to negotiate another connecting flight there and / or trying to ensure that my luggage wasn’t checked all the way through so I could wait in HK for the letter, I left five hours ahead of my flight time. Turns out that this particular airline wasn’t going to be have anyone available until two hours before the flight so the online searching continued with a flight then being booked for one day later, on the same flight as some friends who I was initially to be meeting there.
It meant I would have almost two days (and one full night) in Hong Kong.
This was unexpected and while disappointing that I wasn’t going to be relaxing in Hoi An for a couple of days before friends arrived, the upside was I:
- caught up with some friends who I hadn’t seen for a while and had some great chats
- ate at some of my favourite restaurants and drank some of my favourite beverages
- caught the Star Ferry and saw some language billboards to help people learn Cantonese – 9 tones makes it a tricky language to learn
- sorted out some general admin that occurs when your life is split across a couple of countries eg auto-payments with banks etc
- went to some of my preferred shopping places for some familiar products and ones where I could read the labels
- am now the proud owner of some shoes and a bag that I wouldn’t have even seen
- relaxed in an environment where I really didn’t have to think, make an effort to be understood or have any other cultural or language issues which are a standard part of my life at the moment. These are currently quite challenging and lead me to feeling incredibly tired so to switch off this thinking was bliss.
While I’m a big advocate for good planning and was less than stellar in this particular instance, I think this worked out exactly the way I needed it to given my circumstances of late.
Not too shabby!
* Thanks to Bruce Hornsby and the Range for the title to this post.