two chases

Not in anger, brandishing two large plastic bags

We have all been standing in the queue for a long time when a family walk up, looking a little harried but not as much, if this is their flight, as they should. This is the first clue. There are just three of them, the parents and the gangly son, wielding his phone like has just discovered that it can unlock the universe. It’s the son who calls out, to nobody in particular as they hover at the edge of the line. “Is this for Terminal 2?”, he says. Since he is not quite talking to anybody nobody is quite listening, but someone turns to look, gives him a yes.

So they get in line, but it feels already like they are making a disastrous mistake. Is this for Terminal 2? It’s not the right question - yes, we are in terminal 2, but no more or less than the people in the dozens of other queues all around us - and so maybe yes was not the right answer. I cannot quite muster the condescension to ask, even when my doubled back bit of line passes its straggling tail, where they are flying to. There are at least six Vietjet signs at the front of the line. And to find this particular queue you need to move some way into the belly of the terminal; it’s not a line you could somehow walk in and think is the only line. Even with no clues at all you couldn’t think there is just one, undifferentiated queue. They must know. The parents chat to each other, quietly and smilingly, and the son looks at his phone. After about fifteen minutes, a strangely in-between length of time, they leave the queue.

I am the third last person to check in my bag, the kind of thing that satisfies me for the anxiety it would induce in my colleagues. Actually I was more than on time, but the queue has taken so long that, by the time we are done, the workers have an abrupt realisation that things are not going to schedule, and kick into a gear of very mild panic. After security one of them appears and sweeps back and forth behind the last few of us, like a sheepdog. I have no intention of stopping in duty free, so my ankles are not nipped until a bit further on. From just beside me, half a pace behind, he says - “Vietjet? It’s boarding now, quick, the gate is this way” - at first, confusingly, in a sotto voce that suggests he might just be encouraging himself, so I don’t react until he chivvies me a little more directly. We keep moving, hearts pounding from the chase.

Eventually his urgency draws him past us to man a screen at the gate. I peel off and fill my water bottle, stealing guilty glances over my shoulder. But we all make it. And I am glad for the water because my second meal, which I cave and buy at the seven hour mark, is a cup of salty instant noodles. You can buy them in Coles. Up here, I am told to write my passport number on the receipt, before they can be handed over.

The pilot is on the PA, about the same time, telling us in a drab tone to match our mid-long-haul flatness that it will be 34 degrees on our arrival in Hanoi. This seems about right, not worthy of much attention, drab tone appropriate. But when we land he is back on to tell us, with the smug would-you-believe-it voice and insouciant pause of a game-show host, that we’ve landed in Hanoi where it is thirty! six! degrees! Two degrees warmer - as we all know now - all the difference.

-

I decide to have a craving for sugarcane juice. As soon as this is settled the sugarcane vendors melt away into the traffic and there is nothing but tea and lukewarm beer cans at every turn. Can that be right? I lose confidence, search an image to try and shore up in my mind the exact shade of sweating iced drink that I’m looking for.

In the end I buy something that is not sugarcane juice from a woman, after an interaction so farcical that describing it with any rhetorical flourish would unmoor it from reality completely. So, in the neutral tone of a witness statement:

She waves at me. I point to a plastic cup, one of two, with an icy yellow-ish liquid. She nods and starts to prepare it, getting a bag and slicing a kumquat, pouring in some concentrated tea to complete the drink. I ask how much, and give her my phone to type a price. She enters 500,000, the price of a large meal and drinks for two people. Now we are off the rails. I shake my head and she haggles with her fingers - three, four? It occurs to me that she might have meant 50,000 and I type that. She nods and goes back to the complicated plastic bag, while I take money from my wallet, and hand over a 100,000 note.

Now she starts taking other things from her little display on the ground, energy drinks, bottled tea, a second cup of what I asked for (which, of course, is lemon tea rather than sugarcane juice.) I shake my head at all of this. Although my conscious thought is that it was a mistake, that 500,000 is still registered in my unconscious mind as the ambit claim of a hustler. I am wary. Eventually I accept only the second cup of tea, which she has also placed in a suspect-looking carry bag, spiked with kumquat. She does not seem to be done but I take both teas, raise my hands and nod, then continue down the street, after waiting a moment for any sign that she has further demands.

About two hundred metres further on, a man outside a hotel nods at me, flicks his head behind. I am confused, but half turn and see that the chase is back on: the woman is scuttling after me, not in anger but brandishing two large plastic bags. One is full of some kind of mini-donut, dripping with glaze in the heat. The other is fruit, cut into strips and slices and covered in chilli flakes. She hands them both over to me, and smiles, then turns back to her station. I had, I suppose, given her something like twenty times the right price for a cup of sweating iced tea. I stand there, two iced teas and two bursting bags of unwanted snacks in hand. The hotel man looks at me. The donuts are almost inedible but the chilli fruit salad is somehow delicious.