Well, It's Officially An Adventure

Devoted readers know my friend’s saying, “It’s not an adventure until the first thing goes wrong.”  And, you know, John Passacantando is right.

One of the stressful parts about coming to a four-country trip in Southeast Asia are visas (to be fair, it is far less stressful than it was for Americans coming here in the 1960s and 70s).  Well, for some dumb reason, G Adventures wouldn’t give us an itinerary with dates on it.  

The company claims since they use the same itinerary for these trips, they don’t need to add dates.  Moronic thinking.  (By the way, the same itinerary refers to charging iPods, which haven’t been used in about ten years!  I think the itinerary could use some editing.)  

Carol called G Adventures to find out the day we would be entering.  Sounds great, but the G Adventures person gave her the wrong date.  Bun checked our visas, and while Laos and Cambodia are fine, our Vietnam visas are no good.  Not shockingly, Vietnam was not going to refund the money for G Adventures’ screw-up.

So we sat in our dystopian hotel room (weird colors, an odd bed, lights that didn’t light the room very well) and stayed up till midnight reapplying for the visas.  I gotta say, I could have used that two hours to sleep, but instead I was cranked up by a combination of the clunkiness of the Vietnam visa application website and the inability of G Adventures to provide us with the right information.

I’m writing this whilst sitting the Chiang Mai airport in northern Thailand (great city btw), getting ready to fly to Luang Prabang, Laos, still wondering if we’ll be able to go to Vietnam (again, not something Americans used to want to do).  We’ll find out in Laos if our trip is loused up.

(Editor: Now that you’ve whined for the better part of six paragraphs, I gotta ask – was the “Laos/loused” play on words intentional?  Writer: You shouldn’t even have to ask that question.  None of these jokes are accidents, they are ALL intentional comedy.)