Less Traveled Path

The last time I traveled to Vietnam (about 8 years ago) was with my late father. Although my mother couldn’t join us, she warned us about her experience going through customs in Vietnam a few years earlier and how she was given a hard time because they thought she spoke Vietnamese; the customs officials wanted her to bribe them and pay them off so that they wouldn’t give her a difficult time just because.

My father refused to participate in such corruption and so when we went through customs and the officials started speaking to him in Vietnamese, he pretended not to understand. We were given a slightly difficult time, but passed through without needing to pay them off.

Just recently, I met someone who is also traveling to Vietnam in a less than a month and was told by a travel agent in San Jose, CA that his visa would cost $50 and his friend’s would cost $75. The reason? The guy’s last name could pass for Vietnamese while his friend’s could not.
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Five months ago, two of my good friends entered the lottery for Olympic tickets and they were informed last week that they were granted tickets to four (out of their requested six) events: basketball, diving, water polo, and volleyball. Which means… I am going to Beijing next summer!

I happened to be in San Francisco’s Chinatown this week and decided to stop by Classic Tours for information on tours in China; I was hoping to find an itinerary that would end in Beijing and allow the flexibility for an extension to stay for the Olympics. The travel agent had just returned from a meeting in Beijing about the Olympics and imparted some advice to me:

1. Don’t go to the opening or closing ceremonies - transportation will only be allowed 1-2 miles from the venue which means a mass exodus of people will cause huge human traffic jams
2. No tour company will go anywhere near Beijing during that time - best bet is to tour around China, then catch a plane to Beijing from there, but that plane ticket will not be cheap
3. Accommodations will be expensive - estimate is around $400-$500 a night

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At the end of this past September, I decided I wanted to travel somewhere internationally between Thanksgiving and Christmas and whipped out my passport only to find that it was due to expire in less than six months from my travel dates. Since certain countries in Asia require a US passport to be valid at least six months beyond the dates of the trip, my two options were to change my travel plans to a domestic trip or to renew the passport and pay an extra $60 (on top of the $67 regular fee) to expedite the processing. I reluctantly paid the avoidable fees that made up almost 50% of the total cost.

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I enjoy traveling and so I’ve decided to start a blog on travel especially since I have an international trip coming up. I hope to write while exploring when possible and share photos from my trips here.