Waylaid – A Day at Don Mueang Airport

I told myself the odds were that it would happen eventually, but on February 5, 2020, for the first time in my life, I missed a flight.

When so much of your time is spent moving from place to place and country to country, and the languages, the writing, the time zones, and the currencies are always changing, it can be a challenge to keep on top of all of the details. You do your best to compartmentalize all of the important information and filter out the fluff but come the end of the day it can be the subtlest detail that escapes you and gets you stuck somewhere.

My flight from Bangkok to Hanoi was scheduled for 7 am. Because of the early departure time and not wanting to leave anything to chance, I left downtown Bangkok and booked a room out in the Don Mueang district about 20 kilometres north of the city centre and just steps away from the airport. It was a calm day dedicated to setting up shop for the night, having one last delicious meal, and setting my alarm bright and early to make sure I’d be on time for my flight.

I arrived at the airport the next morning two hours before my flight was all set to leave. I had plenty of time. You find some interesting characters travelling that early in the morning. There was a group of young Japanese travellers, also on their way to Hanoi, making a scene having been out all night drinking who showed up with their luggage in one hand and king-sized beers in the other. They strolled up to the counter nonchalantly and were handed their boarding passes, but I was denied.

The attendant told me that in order to be able to board my flight to Hanoi that I would need to have proof of an onward ticket. I was rattled by the unexpected news and my hands were shaking because of the early morning wakeup call and the doses of morning coffee, but within a few minutes, I had scoured the internet for the cheapest flight, 30 days away, out of Saigon that I could find. For fifty bucks I bought a ticket to Singapore half expecting that I might just cancel it depending on how all of my other plans started to come together.

Once again, the attendant informed me that she could not issue me a boarding pass because, as a Canadian, I required a visa to enter Vietnam. I can’t be too sure where I got my wires crossed, but every day leading up to that morning I had been convinced that I would be able to purchase a visa on arrival. The visa in question was an e-visa that could be obtained through a government website. I remembered how my e-visa for Oman had come through almost instantly so I exited the queue and stationed myself over by somewhere quiet to use the airport’s wifi and quickly entered all of my information and sent it off.

I guess I was hoping that issuing e-visas was somehow controlled by an algorithm because there was really no way a government office would be open at 6 am. Still, I had an hour or so to go before my flight and even though boarding would begin soon, I was hopeful that I could still make it. The airport was quiet with most shops still closed and only a few customer service windows open to aid passengers for the first few flights of the day. I kept refreshing the connection to the airport internet service hoping that an email would come in, but as the last few available moments ticked away it became clear that a flight that I was supposed to be on was going to leave without me. I couldn’t help but think that there was a moment by the boarding gate where an attendant was calling my name telling me to come to the gate as soon as possible but I just couldn’t hear it.

I was powerless to do anything about the situation. I was, however, in control of whatever would happen next and I had a lot of decisions to consider, so many of which depended on the outcome of several circumstances with murky futures. I had already booked a hotel in Hanoi and there was another flight that afternoon at 6 pm, though it was a more expensive flight. I could either transfer my original flight to the afternoon flight or cancel my original flight altogether and get a portion of my money back. According to the website responsible for issuing the e-visa, it could take as much as 5 days to be granted the visa. If that were true, it would mean spending several more nights in Bangkok, but how many?

My brain was a bit fuzzy but I knew that I needed to focus and make the mental calculation of the cost of spending extra nights in Bangkok versus adding the cost of a new flight to Hanoi which, over the next five days, varied from between $80 – $350. There was also the matter of cancelling the hotel reservation I already had in Hanoi and how much I might lose were I to do that. And, were I to take the waiting day-by-day, it could mean spending several days in Don Mueang. I decided to go to customer service to have my ticket cancelled so that I could recoup at least some of my money within the window I had available before it would be forfeited completely. There was a part of me that wanted to call it quits right there and just design a definitive plan that would have me staying in Thailand for some more days and just heading to Vietnam whenever the visa came through. Instead, I hunkered down at the airport Starbucks, opened up my computer, and got to work on my usual tasks for the day.

It was a slow day with the Starbucks employees hovering around me and pressuring me to order something. I tried to concentrate on my work but found myself getting disconnected and then reconnecting to the internet and refreshing my email every few minutes to see if anything had come through. Noon came and went and there was still no news, I gave myself a 4 pm cut off time, if nothing were to come through by then I would call it a day and head back into Bangkok and make other arrangements.

It is difficult to be productive with important things weighing on your mind and, despite my best efforts, most of the day was spent staring at my email inbox and checking the status of my visa request on the Vietnamese government’s website. I knew that at some point I would make it to Vietnam and that all of the stress I was suffering through would be behind me, but at that moment I could not wrest the myriad of possible pathways between here and there from swirling through my mind.

When I checked into my hotel in Hanoi that night I was relieved. Earlier that day, I had imagined arriving early, slowly making my way into the city from the airport, and taking a nice leisurely stroll around town to get used to my new surroundings. Instead, I was taxied in the middle of a rainy night straight to where I was staying with barely enough time to have a bite to eat before sleep overcame me and the first day of my new 30-day visa was all used up.

In total, I spent 9 hours sitting at that Starbucks waiting for my visa application to be approved. And though most of those hours were spent just waiting or mulling over what decision to make next, I did manage to get a bit of work done. There is nothing on the surface that is special or glamorous about Don Mueang Airport but it was my office for a day and I have now spent more time outside the terminal at it than at any other airport. And, had I been aware that Canadians required an e-visa prior to arriving in Vietnam it could have been a day and an experience completely without significance. Instead, I will always remember it as the day I missed a flight and spent the day at the airport Starbucks in Bangkok – such is the reality of these occasional passing days in the life I chose – and there is something wonderful about that.