How Exactly Did We Decide To Visit Vietnam?

It should be no surprise that our latest travel adventure was another Gate1 Tour.  They remain our trusted go-to tour company, particularly for places we would never visit on our own.  In this case, we often look through the various tours and keep a running mental inventory of what interests us.  For Asia, we still have Japan and Vietnam on the list, the latter being there primarily because of the associated sense of mystery.  The timing and location of this trip, however, had an added element.  Long story, but I transferred a slew of frequent flier miles to ANA (Japanese) airlines a couple of years ago.   They were originally to be used to book an award ticket for our travel to Patagonia.  After booking those flights, however, we ended up finding much better routing and pricing elsewhere, so I canceled those original tickets and banked the miles with ANA.  In the middle of 2024, I received notice that these miles would in fact expire in March 2025 if not used.  I could find no way to extend their life, so I set out to find a way to use a not insignificant number of award miles.  The natural first option seemed Japan, as ANA flies nonstop from DC to Tokyo.  Alas, I would learn that using ANA miles for business class seats is next to impossible.  Much better availability existed to book flights on ANA partner airlines, just not on actual ANA flights.  We first looked at using them to get to Namibia, which is on my bucket list.  We wish to visit with our friends the Rieckhoffs, and the dates/tour did not work out for them, so we were back to square one, and that was when we revectored on Vietnam.  I did eventually locate business class seats on Turkish Airlines for at least the return part of our trip, and I was able (after a lot of frustrating calls to the ANA ticket agency) to book those seats and "save" the miles.  With our return set, I found an excellent deal on tickets on Qatar Airways to get us to Vietnam, using credit card points.  That all set, we elected to travel in February, as it is noted as a good time to visit Vietnam (near the end of the dry season, and before the extreme heat), and the our miles we good through the end of the month.

This trip was on the books months before I even thought I'd be in a new job.  On top of that, I could never have anticipated how awful the change in presidential administrations would be, and how work would be absolutely insane.  That is all to say that is was horrendous timing to be away from work, but I couldn't cite "presidential incompetence" as a reason to exercise our trip cancellation insurance.  I had to get over the guilt of going, and being away for almost two weeks, but I saw no alternative.  This is all to lay the groundwork that both of us were not overtly thrilled as we headed to the airport on a Saturday evening.  It did not help that we had warnings of an ice storm for that very afternoon/evening.  The airport was eerily quiet, which we didn't mind, but it was obvious that we were leaving following the normal afternoon crunch of flights to Europe.  We waited in the Turkish Airlines lounge.  We had some food and soon realized we had people at either table around us who were actively sick.  Both were sniffling away and I got skived out, so we moved.  In hindsight, as we both got sick during this trip, I'm still not sure if it was truly all from exposure in Vietnam, or if maybe this was our "patient zero" experience, before we even left the United States.

We had what are marketed as "honeymoon seats" on our Qatar Airways flight to Doha.  Two seat pods in the middle of the aircraft.  Each had a sliding door, and the partition between the seats could be lowered completely, allowing the seats to be made up into a double bed.  It was, by far, the nicest business class I have ever flown, with outstanding service and very good sleeping.  It was a 12-hour flight to Doha, but it went quickly, arriving in the early evening of Sunday.  

In the Doha Airport During Our Layover

You Can Take the Girl out of England, But Can't Take the England Out of the Girl

Overlooking the Huge Indoor Garden in the Doha Airport

We had a shortish layover and visited a gigantic lounge, which was only one of several for Qatar Airways.  The scale was truly over the top.  Our next flight was nonstop to Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, and was to depart around 8:00pm.  We did not have honeymoon seats on this final flight, but the seats did become beds and we both got another solid block of sleep.  It was an almost 8-hour flight, and we arrived into Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) early on Monday morning, just in time for the morning rush hour.  

On the Flight to Ho Chi Minh City

Arrival into Smoggy Ho Chi Minh City

I had read that clearing immigration in Vietnam can be particularly time consuming.  We had to get tourist visas to visit, and we knew they were extremely judicious in enforcing that.  When we checked in for our flight at Dulles, the Qatar Airways agent spent an inordinate amount of time scrutinizing the paper visa, and a supervisor had to personally double check before allowing us to check-in.  I guess a lot of folks get turned around when they try to enter Vietnam, and the cost to return those folks falls on the airline.  Knowing this, I had booked an expediter service, which was to "whisk up through arrival formalities."  The expeditor was waiting for us as we deplaned, and he did "whisk" us past a very long and incredibly slow-moving queue of folks waiting to clear immigration.  He brought us over to the diplomatic corps line, which was nonexistent.  After a lot of talking back and forth with an agent, he was told to instead deposit us in the wheelchair line.  I felt guilty, but he assured us it was okay.  This line was very short, but also very slow-moving.  Whenever someone in a wheelchair came up, they were put at the front of the line, which helped assuage my guilt somewhat.  We had to clear immigration separately, and for a while it looked like they were going to send me elsewhere for more screening.  Right after he pointed me to secondary, he called me back, pointed at his computer, said something, and promptly stamped my passport.  The expediter was on the other side and got us to our luggage carousel before melting back into the airport crowds.  

Both of our bags happily arrived and were among the first to come out.  We emerged outdoors to meet our transfer driver, and it was an incredibly pleasant morning.   Warm, in the 70s, with low humidity, which was a nice surprise.  I had expected to emerge into a wall of humidity, as when I arrive in Thailand, but was pleasantly surprised.  Our driver, however, was nowhere to be seen.  I don't think they expected us to clear so quickly, so I had to contact them via WhatsApp.  They responded immediately, and our driver was there a few minutes later. 

I'm not sure what I expected, other than maybe another version of Bangkok, but that was proven wrong.  As soon as we left the airport, we were assaulted by the sheer number of scooters on the roads.  It was a literal sea of scooters everywhere, and the far, far outnumbered the cars, around which they swarmed.  It was almost rhythmic how they ebbed and flowed around our taxi, as he navigated the city streets.  I quickly lost any sense of direction, and I knew that our hotel in "old Saigon" was not overly far from the airport, but it nonetheless took almost 45 minutes, given the volume of traffic and the mishmash of streets and arteries.  It was quickly evident too, especially once we were driving alongside the Saigon River, that Vietnam has a serious problem with trash.  Litter was prevalent, and the river looked almost half frozen, given the volume of flotsam and detritus in the water.  I tried to look beyond it, but the image remains.

On Our Drive to the Hotel

Our hotel was quite nice, and well located in what is called old Saigon.  We quickly learned, too, that while Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) became the official name of what had been Saigon in 1976 -- when the communists prevailed and "unified" north and south -- locals use both city names interchangeably.  There seemed no stigma to using either name, and HCMC is certainly a lot to write out every time.  I will admit, too, that I had expected Vietnamese to have their own script, similar to Thai, Cambodian, or Chinese, but while they had used Mandarin script in the past, under French occupation, they adopted Western characters, so all of the signs were written in readable Vietnamese.  That did mean, however, that unlike in those other Asian countries, English was not on most signage.  That was at times challenging, but I found it all rather interesting.

We arrived at the hotel around 8:30am, and our room was not yet ready.  Our actual tour did not begin until the following morning, and while we had this first day to acclimate, we also did not want to "lose" the time.  Knowing what we'd be seeing of Saigon in our tour, I had booked a "cyclo tour" of "hidden Ho Chi Minh City" for the late morning.  We were to be picked up at 11:00am, so we settled into the hotel lobby and waited.  Our room ended up being ready in less than an hour, so we had time to unpack and freshen up, being careful to avoid the desire to crawl into bed.