The Return Home

(written 07/09/09, posted 14/10/09)

My flight home is early. It’s an irony that the place I’m going on my VSO placement, India, is the place I have a stopover. Getting off in Mumbai is an experience in itself and the airport feels pretty chaotic even though we are pretty much herded through the airport as we’re all on the connecting flight to Heathrow. Seeing people asleep on airport benches and the cacophony of mobile ringtones gives me a brief insight into the Indian culture I’ll be living in for a year come November.

The flight is pretty uneventful and I pass time catching up on my journal and watching a cheesy movie I thought would be a waste of two hours of my life but turns out to be strangely enjoyable.

On the tube from Heathrow I see strange phenomena a few metres below me as I go over a bridge. Namely, a red London bus and a black taxi cab moving slowly in traffic. They appear tiny from my train where I am watching the world go by below. After 9 weeks away I am surprised at how odd they both look. People kept telling me that by going to Asia I would find myself. I don’t think this happened as I was never lost. What it did give me was a different perspective that time away does. It turns out it was also a practice run for what is going to be my new life for the next year as a VSO volunteer in New Delhi. And after my brief insight at the airport, this is something I can’t wait to now get started.

Holding back the tears...

(written on 10/08/09, posted 01/10/09)

Time to say our goodbyes...we said goodbye to a load of people who'd been with us all week and now it was time to say goodbye to the legendary Hoa himself and a couple more of the guests.

We were due to get the plane south to Saigon (no more buses for T and the flights were £31 each so L and myself thought it was a bargain - so much for my personal environmental pledge to only go overland whilst in Asia). Just that morning, I discovered my Vietnamese visa was 3 days out of date and I wasn't planning to leave the country for another few days after Saigon. Big Ooops. This could spell a bit of a disaster. We had our passports checked but not the visa stamps luckily. There were a couple if times I got a bit of the old clammy hands syndrome. Nothing to worry about then until getting to the border although I guess I could sort it out at the embassy in Saigon.

We didn't get to Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City (it's modern name) until 6pm so it was a case of a taxi and find some accommodation. The taxi ride was fun and there were even more motos than Hanoi so it seemed even more chaotic on first impressions.

We ended up in the backpacker district so it was all clubs and bars. T, L and myself went up for a good nosh up and a couple of G&Ts. We were trying to plan what to do over the next three days, but it's always fun not knowing what you'll end up doing but just discussing all the possibilities.