Jiangsu, P.R.C to Phan Thiet, Vietnam
Travelling anywhere, or making the necessary arrangements to do so in Asia can be a lesson in frustration or patience (depending on your outlook) but our last few weeks in China took the proverbial biscuit. We were preparing to leave Jiangyin; our home for the preceding 7 months, travel to Vietnam for a few days vacation at the beach before proceeding to Taiwan to continue teaching in a new locale.
Let me start at the beginning.
In order to travel to Taiwan you must have a visa if you want to stay for more than 30 days; the Taiwanese government will not issue a work permit or Alien Residency Card on anything less than a 60 day visitor visa and as we are intending to work we must have a work permit or face the possibility of deportation.
Most employers here sidestep a lot of bureaucratic red tape by having you enter the country as a tourist and once you are in Taiwan they will issue you a work permit provided you pass the required health check.
Apparently this is much easier than applying for a work permit before entering the country but the downside to this whole rigmarole is that the Taiwanese government treats you like a visitor; after all in their eyes that is what you are. This means that they want to see proof that you intend to leave Taiwan (return flight tickets), planned itineraries for your 'vacation' in Taiwan and in some instances can even ask you to present bank statements showing that you are able to support yourself (without working illegally) while in the country! So, even though as Canadian citizens we are allowed to enter the country without a visa for up to 30 days, we are forced to jump through bureaucratic hoops to satisfy immigration, the government and our potential employers.
Unfortunately, even though China regards Taiwan as a 'rogue' province of the motherland, albeit with its own elected government (what a novel concept), currency, and economic ties you cannot apply for a Taiwanese visa from anywhere on the mainland.
Worse still, you cannot access any of the web sites that will allow you to get any information about the application procedure or the location of the consulates / embassies.
Lest you weren't 100% sure, big brother IS watching!!
So after concluding that we would have to leave the mainland just to apply for the Taiwanese visa we figured we might as well do it from our vacation destination; Vietnam. This limited our choices to the areas around Ho Chi Minh or Hanoi as we discovered that they are the only two cities that have Taiwanese embassies.
We started the ball rolling on our Viet visa application; just in time as it turned out, we also started scouring the internet for resorts where we could spend a few days resting and relaxing on a beach. We eventually settled on an area called Mui Ne beach in an area called Phan Thiet about 4 hours drive north west from Ho Chi Minh.
After a lot of buggering around trying to decide on arrival dates (I'm sorry sir there are no flights on THAT day; I'm sorry sir there are no vacancies on THAT day; I'm sorry sir there are no rooms available for THAT length of time...you get the idea) we fixed on a resort called the Ocean Star Resort and confirmed a reservation.
Bear in mind that all the communications back and forth between us and travel agents, resorts etc was conducted by e-mail and you can imagine the frustration.
The process went something like this:
Send an e-mail to a number of agents or resorts and wait until the next day for a reply.
Read the replies, say "F***!!' loudly and frequently and change the plans.
This continued for a soul destroying two weeks.
Eventually however, we managed to secure a reservation, find a flight for a reasonable price and get our passports sent away (and returned with visas no less) in time for our departure. At the same time we were also winding up our contract, sifting through our belongings to decide what we should take with us and trying to find jobs in Taiwan.
On top of all this there was a looming complicating factor; Spring Festival.
The national Chinese holiday which essentially shuts down the country also occurs in Vietnam we found out (only it is called 'Tet'). Due to this celebration the Taiwanese embassies in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh would be shut until the 22nd of February. As a result we wouldn't be able to get our visa application processed upon arriving in Ho Chi Minh and would have to wait until after the holiday. This meant that we would have to head back to HCM after being at the beach and start the process. Just to throw a spanner into the works you cannot apply for a visa unless you first have a flight confirmed, the flight cannot be one way, you must prove that you intend to leave the country...or so we were led to believe.
The fact that we didn't yet have confirmed jobs was a mere trifle compared to the difficulties associated with acquiring the visa. We also had no idea how long it would take the consulate in HCM to process our visa applications so we had no definite idea when we could start work. We tried to send the Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office e-mails but no replies ever returned. I'm not sure if this was due to the fact that they were censored on the way out or on the way back to us. What I do know is that during the month or so that we were trying to get information so that we could confirm start dates with employers we were never able to access a single Taiwanese related site and we never received any kind of reply to requests for information from a single Taiwanese governmental agency.
Weird huh?
Regardless, we had to formulate a plan of attack, even if it was subject to change, so we decided on heading from the beach back to HCM on February 26th and booking a ticket to Taiwan (with a refundable return to Hong Kong) leaving HCM around March 1st. We had to hope that this would give the embassy enough time (two days) to process our visas.
So that was it, the plan was fluidly set, the wheels were in motion and we could look forward and plan our exodus from China.
Because of the Spring Festival / Chinese New Year bus schedules and other modes of transportation are restricted and more expensive than normal so we weren't surprised when we were told that the only bus available and leaving for Shanghai Pudong airport on the 19th of February was leaving at 10:30 a.m.
As we were flying the red eye into Ho Chi Minh (the only flight available that fit into our plan) this meant that we would have about 8 hours to kill at the airport which, although it held no appeal initially, actually turned into a good thing.
I had noticed on the air ticket that the luggage allowance was 20 kg per person.
'That must be wrong' I thought to myself; 'it must be for carry on or something, even if it's right they can't expect us to only take 20 kg apiece when we're leaving the country with everything we own can they?'
Well, of course they can.
We weighed the luggage upon arrival at the airport and were horrified to find that we were 50 kg over! Not only that, they wanted to charge us 70 RMB ($10) per kg that we were over so the fine was going to cost more than one of our tickets to Vietnam!!
Time to rethink this one.
We were allowed 2 pieces of carry on but hadn't wanted to take the maximum because our smaller suitcases were still pretty large and heavy but now we didn't care. After taking 2 pieces of carry on out of the check through equation we were still about 25 kgs over. We begged, we whined and we pleaded and the nice airline lady agreed to give us an additional 10 kgs allowance which reduced our penalty to about 15 kgs.
Time for some final sorting; out came the books, old, tired winter clothes, hangars, raggedy jeans and hand towels from the carry on, anything that hadn't been worn for a while or didn't fit so well anymore was tossed from the check through baggage into a small pile by the counter. Next we relocated as much as we could from the check through to the carry on and prayed they wouldn't weigh it or raise too much of an eye at its dimensions and sat back to kill time.
It worked splendiferously. Even though we were still a few kgs over the nice airline lady tagged it through and even allowed us to check through an item that we had expected to have to carry on. I think she felt sorry for us. We had gone from a fine of 3500 RMB (about $500) to zero and we were pretty pleased with ourselves.
The flight from Shanghai to HCM was uneventful and we arrived at 1 a.m local time.
I must admit to some feelings of sadness as we watched the lights of mainland China disappearing into the inky blackness below us. Every once in a while the gloom was shattered by the flash of fireworks exploding into the night sky in celebration of the New Year.
The Chinese love their fireworks like no other people on earth and the thought of the merriment continuing unabated below us as we left made me smile. I wondered if anybody on the ground was looking up at the lights of the aircraft and bidding us adieu or if we were leaving China as we had entered, unnoticed and uncertain as to what the next stage of our journey would bring.
We had hoped to sleep for a few hours in the airport upon arrival in HCM but that notion was destroyed as we left customs and saw that there was no waiting room.
Get your bags, get your stamps, get out.
I have to say that the process was very smooth and efficient though, for once our baggage was ready and waiting for pick up as soon as we reached the carousels.
We had also hoped to find a luggage storage so that we could unload some weight as we were planning on returning to HCM after our vacation.
No deal, it was closed, so we were lumbered with travelling with all the luggage.
We took a cab to the train station, only getting mildly ripped off by the cab driver along the way. He started negotiations at $20 US for the trip, I bartered him down to $10 for both of us and then was mildly irked to see that the final price was less than $4.
Oh well a deal's a deal.
Happy New Year you thieving little git.
HCM only has one train station so we knew we were in the right one even though for such a large city it is decidedly 'Mickey Mouse'. We had assumed, incorrectly it turned out, that it would be a mass of humanity and activity as 'Tet' is the peak travel time in Vietnam. As it turned out we were the only people in the whole place except for a security guard snoring beside his cigarette pack on his cot in the waiting room.
Not to worry though, we had been assured that we could buy tickets to Phan Thiet when the ticket office opened at 6 a.m and we had been further guaranteed that there would be an early train leaving at 6:50 a.m regardless of the holiday.
So I was a little non-plussed, actually pissed off would be a more appropriate description, when after about 5 hours of sitting in the train station swatting bugs and trying to catch a bit of sleep I lined up to buy my tickets with the sharp elbowed grannies and other queue jumping, bad breathed, yelling customers and was told 'Not today, tomorrow'...
Guess what word sprang to mind.
That's right.
'F***!!' we had booked a room for that night based on the notion that we would be able to get to the resort and now we were being told to wait until the next day.
Pardon my French but bugger that for a game of soldiers.
Cost be damned, I was too tired to go looking for buses and potentially being told the same thing again, especially when we were lugging all of that baggage so I made an executive decision. I wandered outside to the taxi ranks and started bargaining.
The train to Phan Thiet was supposed to cost about $5 each but taxis were starting at $100 or $50 each.
The cost of convenience.
I haggled one guy who seemed interested down to $40 each and moments later we were off on a direct run to the resort; no more transfers or fighting through crowds with our bags. We settled down for the 4 hour drive.
When we arrived the hassles and frustrations seemed all the more worthwhile. The sun was shining, it was HOT and the resort was just beautiful with a white sand beach stretching around a distant peninsula. The room wasn't ready because we were early so we went for a bite to eat and then strolled down the sand enjoying the feel of the sunshine on our bodies.
The sun was SO intense!
One hour of exposure and the tops of my feet, my back and shoulders were burnt to a crisp but finally I'd got some colour on my little, pale, white body again.
It felt wonderful.
Of course I spent the next few days peeling and trying to avoid getting even more burnt but I didn't care, melanoma be damned the breeze, sun and surf were exquisite.
Phan Thiet Hotels
