Tuesday 18th March
I arrived in Hong Kong very early in the morning. I pottered around the
airport for about an hour or so. I had a couple of cigarettes in the
small, somewhat nasty, smoking rooms. I couldn’t quite tell if all the
men inside stared at me because I was breaking some kind of social more by
smoking as a woman or whether it was that when I went in I managed to
crash the glass door against the wall with some force. The doors did look
much heavier than they were and by this point I was operating on very
little sleep. Hong Kong itself was very misty, to the extent that I
thought the Pilot might struggle landing. The mist cleared slightly and I
could make out the mountains in the distance.
I was misled by my timetable as the landing time in Saigon was an hour
after departing from Hong Kong. It soon became apparent that I was
crossing yet another time zone and the flight was in fact, longer than I
thought.
After a relatively short flight I touched down in Saigon. Prior to
landing we were told that it was 31 degrees and by God it felt it when I
got out of the plane in my long-sleeved top and jeans. My bag took what
felt like an eon to come around the baggage counter and I wondered if it
had decided to end its journey in Hong Kong rather than continuing as I
did. Eventually it popped through the sliced rubber cat-flap and I
prasied it for making the journey from Heathrow without consulting me.
At customs I had a plastic bag with two books in. I put it on the desk as
the customs guy looked at my passport. He pointed at the bag and said
‘bomb?’. I said, ‘No, books’. He continued to point at the bag and
repeat his question as I maintained my response. I was sligtly bemused by
this and looked over my shoulder to check whether I was about to be
surrounded by armed guards. When it transpired that no-one else was
taking him seriously I decided that he just had a rubbish sense of humour.
I went out of customs, changed some money and ordered a taxi at the desk.
Although this was probably more expensive (about 6 pounds for a 30 minute
journey) the sight of the gaggling crowd of drivers touting for business
was not a tempting one in my somewhat dishevelled state. The man at the
counter pointed to a spot where I should wait outside, smoke a cigarette
and then he would come and take me to my taxi. I obliged and, having
discovered half-way through my cigarette that I was surrounded by
no-smoking signs, I realised that he had also not come out. I tried to go
back into the airport and was stopped by a guard who said I could not
re-enter the building. After looking pathetic and making random hand
gestures he appeared to feel sorry for me and let me back in – or maybe it
was just the smell he could not tolerate after my long journey!
I went back to the desk and found the guy sat with all his colleagues
happily tucking into his lunch. His instant overly apologetic reaction
led me to believe (I don’t think naively) that he had simply forgotten.
He took me outside to a taxi and I began the journey from the airport to
my hotel in Saigon.