Lynn and Hector dropped us at the Days Inn near DIA on Friday night so we could catch our 6AM Saturday flight. We flew to Dallas, changed planes and headed westward. Thirteen hours, three movies and two and a half meals later and it is 3 PM Sunday and we are in Narita, Japan. At my age I can hardly afford to misplace days; each one is precious. In another 3 hours we should have boarded a Japan Airlines flight for Hanoi and with luck arrived 5 hours later in Hanoi. With even more luck the promised hotel pick-up would have met us and we could try to synchronize our bodies with local time.
But we just experienced one of those “Oh, shit” moments. We were summoned back to the ticket counter. It seems visitors to Vietnam must secure a visa before entering the country. Somehow (stupidity) someone (me) overlooked that fact and now we are stranded in Narita. We will be forced to spend two nights in Japan so we can get to the Vietnamese embassy in Tokyo and purchase our visas. Our hotel costs about $100 a night, not so bad for Japan, but food is outrageously expensive.
So this morning we shuttled back to the airport to catch a train to the Shibuya-ku district of Tokyo where the Vietnamese Embassy is improbably located in a very much working class neighborhood. Only a communist country would set up shop in an area like this. We found it only with the help of our cab driver’s GPS and would never have found our way to the metro stop without the help of a wonderful Japanese woman.
Getting the visa was pretty much as expected including the bureaucratic snail’s pace. They cost $60 each which pretty much used up our US currency. They really would have preferred Japanese yen but we had even less of those. But now, poorer but wiser, we are ready to go. The debacle in Japan will cost nearly $400 including hotels, train fares and food but we got to see some of the country. The Japanese seem like wonderful people, friendly and always willing to go out of their way to help.
