Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
I seem to recall there being an arab form of execution called Death by a Thousand Cuts. If you need to fly into Vietnam you will face a variant: Near Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts.
Take a chair, take a book, take a Valium, take a deep breath, and take the pain.
There should have been a sign saying 'Welcome to the Visa Desk. Today we are celebrating F_ck with the Foreigners Day'.
Oddly that would have been helpful. It would have involved having a sign, for example, but no. Queue with your passport at the ready for half an hour under the sign saying All Passports first. Then the Shouting Uniformed Lady will helpful shout directions to go back the way you came.
Up a side corridor you find thirty people in varying degrees of breakdown. One lady with thee children is screaming at one of the officers. A middle aged white man with Japanese wife in tow is pleading with another officer, not taking the hints that the paperwork could be sorted out for another $200...
I started on my second queue of the exercise to get to the glass hatch. 15 minutes before I get to handover my papers. I was 100% prepared, or so I thought. I'd been in contact with the Vietnamese embassy in London to sort my visa weeks in advance.
Amazingly, and despite being a communist state, Vietnam has privatised its visa applications. You do it all online over three days, paying forty bucks for the privilege and pay by PayPal. Then they email you a scanned letter, signed by somebody who has epaulettes, and with some good stamps in red ink. All very official looking. All very modern, you think. Naive, naive. Because that is your visa. Now you need to get it stamped. so you need to go to the Stamping office, aka the glass hatch.
So, queue two down. Papers handed over. They take them, including your passport (scarily) and a photo, which they staple to a form for you to fill in.
Does your $40 buy you the use of a pen? No. So the foreigners, who have already formed a rebel alliance against the oppressors, cluster around someone's biro. It's a bit like the conch in Lord of the Flies.
And the form keeps asking you for info that is only inside your passport, which they've taken away, and if it is wrong then you have to queue for another form.
Eventually you hand in the form. Take seat please. Thank you, how kind. But there appear to be four seats and thirty people? Take seat please. Er. Okay.
Then you wait. And wait. Occasionally a name is called out by another Shouting Lady in a thick Saigon-cum-Glaswegian accent over a tannoy. She is ten feet away, but the tannoy makes it harder to understand her, so it is essential.
Another american guy just cracked. Buddy, I've been waiting for 50 minutes. Where is my passport? F_ck it. Put me back on the plane and I'll go on vacation some place else that isn't run by Nazis.
Ouch, bad call. You know, deep down, his papers went to the bottom of the pile again.
The lady with the kids is now sitting cross legged on the floor crying, being comforted by the Japanese lady.
My name is called. $25 please. But I already paid $40 online? Yes, this is separate. Fortunately I have the cash in dollars. Another chap only has yen. He has to pay a charge to be escorted out through customs by a man with a gun to get to an ATM, and then back again.
I've never felt so emasculated. I pay. I get my stamp, then I go back to that first queue to start again.
I'm not out of the woods.
No, the currency sellers are lying in wait for fresh prey coming out of customs. Now this is a new one on me. There are 12 kiosks selling currency. However they won't take plastic. So you have to use the one ATM in the place. Is it a free-to-use one? Don't be silly
I surrender. Just get me to my hotel.
- comments