About plane rides

There is a lot to be said about plane rides.
When I sit on the couch and look up flights, I’m thinking – 12 hour flight, meh, easy! That’s not a big effort for getting to a completely different place, and I book it.
Once I have gone through all the check ins, customs, security checks, the WAITING and finally sit on the plane, and then realise I have another 12 hours to go, I see it differently.

Leaving Sydney on 23rd December, we left our house around 5 AM on a Monday to beat the morning traffic, and to get to the airport early enough. The flight left around 10AM. Ok, we survived the flight, but turned out the company decided to have a stop over we had no idea about. So at 6 PM we were in Ho Chi Minh, and instead of just changing planes, it turned out we also had to apply for visa there not in the final destination.
It would have been alright, I had everything prepared – passport pictures, filled in forms, Visa on Arrival organised. So in theory it would have been alright, but Vietnam is still a communist country. And that means queueing, for everyone, equally. We handed our passports and paperwork over the counter and sat down, prepared for a long wait. As in a good communist country one is not told how long the wait is, it’s better to be quiet and wait than to cause trouble and complain. The latter only works in democratic capitalist countries.
We waited, without much hope, and knowing we only had an hour and half until the next flight. Until an angel from our airlines flew by and asked for our flight details. She took off with the papers without saying a thing. As you do.
Shortly after that we got our passports with shiny new visas. We figured it was pure coincidence as there was no sign of our angel lady and went back to queue for customs. As you do.
Shortly after that our angel lady came up to us and asked why we didn’t wait for her. As you do.
After that things really got cracking, we were taken to places, we received our luggage, we dropped off our luggage.

After that we waited again. To get on a plane to Hanoi, but I tell you what, I was ok. I had packed some beef jerky, so I was just eating that and staring blankly. And Aidan was ok, because he got to go and have a cigaret. So we were fine, eventually we got on another plane and flew to Hanoi.

And in Hanoi we had a car come and pick us up. Because even when I sit on the car and think that a 12-hour flight is easy-peasy, I want to be picked up and be taken to somewhere with a bed. When we got to our hotel, it was 10PM in Hanoi. That would have been 2am in Sydney and about 22 hours since we left our house.

The nice vietnamese man at the hotel told us to sit down at a table, and we did. He offered to bring us tea and wanted to have a chat. I was confused, there was no-one else at the desk, why didn’t he just let us check in? And then I realised this was Vietnam and based on my internet research and the fact he kept asking what our plans in Hanoi were, he was going to try to sell us some tours. I looked at him with my red eyes, bright open from all the sleeplessness and told him: Can we please just have our room keys? We have travelled for 22 hours…

All that comes to my mind, when I look at that picture of the plane wing, and I still quite like the picture!