February has ended so it’s become okay to get a little excited about two weeks biking in Vietnam starting the end of March.
Of course, it’s not a bad idea to get a little bit organized too, and one of the things to keep in mind when planning a visit to Vietnam is the necessity of arriving with a valid travel visa.
(I’d insert a snide comment about Communist countries at this point except last month I paid an additional $250 to have my non-Communist Australian visa extended so that there won’t be an unpleasant scene at Immigration when I land in Melbourne on the way home from said Vietnam trip. $250! Visas, it seems, are a great way to extract arbitrary amounts of money from tourists. At $75 the Vietnam visa appears to be a relative bargain.)
dp and I sort of knew a visa was necessary but didn’t do too much about it. March 1 we both had the thought that a glitch in the visa-approval process or delay in the sending and receiving of documents might result in our visas not being ready on time — or worse, our passports in transit limbo the day our flight left. So on March 1 dp came home with printouts of the visa application forms, and on March 2 I placed the forms, a cheque, and both passports in an Express Post envelope alongside a second, self-addressed Express Post envelope, and dropped the package into a mailbox. That would be 2 PM on the 2nd of March.
(Aside: mailing your actual, physical passport to a foreign embassy when you’re already living in a foreign country is a great way to obtain your recommended daily allowance of anxiety and dread.)
At around 9 AM on the 4th of March the motorcyclist/postman dropped off the mail. And in the mail was the self-addressed Express Post envelope containing our passports and visas.
It’s important to note the Embassy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is in Canberra, ACT. That means our package made it from the mailbox to the Hobart postal facility, was dispatched to Canberra, was delivered, opened, and processed at the Embassy, and the self-addressed envelope was collected, sorted, returned to Hobart, sorted again and stuffed into our mailbox inside of 44 hours. Alternately, the Australian Post Office has figured out how to teleport mailbags across the country. Either way I’m impressed. And that’s not even taking into account the lightning speed of the embassy staff in getting the visas organized. Aren’t creaking socialist bureaucracies supposed to be ponderous and inefficient?
With the visa situation sorted out I can start obsessing about some other facet of the trip. For example, what’s the minimum amount of physical preparation one can get away with yet still expect to survive the bike rides on the trip?













