Tag 2: First night, first day, first disappointment

After we went to bed very late last night, as reported, we of course got up exemplary early today to fight our jet lag a bit.

So around noon we slowly rose from bed, unfortunately so slowly that we missed the chance to have the best Pho soup in Hanoi for breakfast (according to Malte, who had thoroughly tested it during previous visits). The place had already closed due to the late hour. To be honest, all the classic breakfast spots were already shut down.

Therefore, after we finally started to feel real hunger for breakfast and couldn’t decide, we went to the supermarket first to stock up on a small snack for the road and a few instant soups for our stay at the airport, from which we were supposed to fly to New Delhi this evening. We also wanted to be prepared for the bus ride from New Delhi to Shimla in the evening. The day before, we had spotted a restaurant across from the barber, and because we happened to be nearby after wandering around on the main street, we decided to have our “breakfast” there. It was a rather simple restaurant; rice combined with either fish, meat, or beef. Nothing special, but still quite classic. Tourists probably wouldn’t pick this restaurant first. Leon chose the fish, and Malte went for the chicken. On the way back to the apartment, Leon grabbed a Bac Xiu, the Vietnamese coffee we had already mentioned yesterday.

We planned to sort out a few organizational matters before our flight, including getting this blog back online. However, once we got home, Malte decided he hadn’t had enough sleep yet. Additionally, he was still drained from his dengue vaccination and took a short rest. In the end, Malte lay on the sofa for an hour, and of course, Leon ended up doing everything except what he had planned, and soon it became a bit stressful to finish the preparations for the flight in time.

It turned out that we actually had to take almost everything we had planned to bring for our stay in Vietnam, with the difference that we were allowed to take about 20 kg less luggage. But in the end, it looked quite good.

We took a Grab taxi to the airport, weighed our luggage there, and it fit perfectly. High spirits, high fives, and great joy about the upcoming flight to India and the wedding we were invited to there. So over to the check-in counter for Vietjet Air: “Passport please!” and then “Hm, do you have a Visa?!” Malte and Leon looked at each other, then at the lady at the counter, perplexed: “Visa?! Visa-on-arrival you mean?!” “No, there is no Visa-on-arrival.” We had vaguely informed ourselves online before our departure and seen that there is a Visa-on-arrival for India. However, what we didn’t see was that there is no Visa-on-arrival for Germany… Well, the next option to somehow fix our mistake: eVisa. That sometimes works quite short notice. Until we found out that an eVisa cannot be applied for with a provisional passport. But Leon had specifically gotten just that, as he didn’t see the point in getting a full passport for the full fee. Therefore, the visa would have had to be applied for at the Indian embassy in Vietnam, which would have been very expensive and also taken way too long to be issued.

To make a long story short: we saw our chances slipping away more and more, and it became increasingly clear that we probably couldn’t travel to India. Malte briefly considered flying alone, as with his passport he might still get the visa, but then decided against it.

So we began to cancel any tickets we could. Of course, there wasn’t much left of the original price, nor of our mood. We stayed at the airport for a few more minutes, trying to salvage what we could.

The end of the story was that we drove home quite disappointed, ate the instant soups, treated ourselves to a beer by the lake, and then once again went to bed much too late. Actually, a rather reconciliatory ending of an otherwise quite irreconcilable day.

So irreconcilable that we didn’t take a single picture.

Another story to tell. There will probably be another episode from India here sometime soon—hopefully soon.

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