Compounding Errors and the Cost of Stupidity

You really can’t pin this on us. How could we have possibly known?

It turns out that some people take their Tourist Visa requirements very seriously. At least, some of them do, some of the time. Unless there is a reason not to… but we’ll come back to that.

Like a Tasmanian Devil In Heat

So, we’re running through Melbourne Airport. It’s a very nice airport, in case you haven’t been there. There’s a lot to see and a lot to do, but at the moment we are running—not because we are sure that we have anywhere to be, but because we aren’t absolutely sure that we don’t have somewhere to be. We had just arrived after a short flight from Tasmania, which was terribly delayed for some really important reason that never percolated up the to the consciousness of any of us who were actually going to ride on the plane—any of us who were counting on an on-time arrival to connect us to our next flight. 

When we finally made it out of the plane from the depths of economy seating, we still had about twenty-three minutes before our next flight was supposed to leave. Twenty-three minutes to navigate an airport we had never been in and clear whatever security was necessary to continue to New Zealand, which is actually a separate country (not merely a province of Australia, as suggested in jest by both Kiwis and Aussies). There was no real chance of catching that flight, but you still run, it would be defeatist not to. 

We ran a full eighty or ninety meters before encountering an attendant at an information desk. We were in a hurry; she wasn’t. Maybe she wasn’t in a hurry because she wasn’t about to miss a flight to NZ, or maybe she wasn’t in a hurry because she knew something that we didn’t know. Nineteen minutes left. It was the latter; she knew that not even a Tasmanian Devil in heat could catch that plane. She was so sure that she had already booked us on another flight—six hours in the future. Ever hang out in the Melbourne Airport for six hours? We have, and as I said, it’s a very nice airport. 

A Very Nice Airport

First, we tried to get to our gate. I love getting to our gate early; it gives me a sense of halcyon. And we aren’t often early, so I figured by getting to our gate six hours early, we could store up some beaucoup halcyon time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. The check-in counter wasn’t even open that far in advance. So, we hung out here for a while, and then we hung out there. For a while, we even hung out in that place over there. Finally, the lights flickered on, and some kindly but bored airline employees wandered over to see who could be first to check in to their flight. 

We were almost first, except that we weren’t, not by a long shot. We started at the kiosk, hoping that the computer wouldn’t ask to check the weight of our carry-on bags. They were only supposed to be seven kilograms each, but I’m pretty sure mine was almost seven and a half kilograms. I could get it back under seven like it was in the morning, but only by putting on all of my winter clothes. In Australia. In summertime. So, when the computer told me—stupid computer—that I had to go to the ticket counter and talk to a real person, I started donning jackets and mittens. 

However, it turns out she didn’t care how much my bag weighed, or what my core body temperature was, or whether or not I was sweating and smelled bad. (She might have cared about that, but she was kind enough not to say anything.) What she did want was to make sure that we were complying with the strict New Zealand Tourist Visa requirements. 

Of Course, We Can Go To New Zealand, Right?

My eyes took on a distant look as my mind slipped slowly back to a pleasant room at a hostel in Melbourne, only a few miles from where we were now standing, weeks earlier. It was late at night, with an anticipated big travel day in the morning—a long walk followed by an early ferry ride to Tasmania, followed by a rental car to some distant hotel. That night, though, in a rare show of preparation, we were finalizing our plans for New Zealand, and after buying our plane tickets, I turned to Holly, gave her a high five, and smiled. We’re going!

I promptly texted our friends in New Zealand to share the newly-definitive nature of our almost-for-sure plan to visit them in the world’s most desirable islands on the far side of everywhere else. Luckily, as far as I can ascertain, our friends never sleep and promptly replied via text that we needed to make sure we got our New Zealand visas. Ah, visas. Always with the visas.

New Zealand, being very innovative, as well as lush with foliage and Lord of the Rings memorabilia, has an app that you can install on your phone to facilitate the process of applying for a visa. I entered all of our information, dragged our sleeping children one by one out of their bunks to take their dreary-eyed visa photos, and hit ‘submit.’ We generally secure visas before buying plane tickets (haunting foreshadowing, just so you know), a good policy, but one that proved unnecessary in this instance; by the time we woke in the morning, New Zealand had approved our request.

To Which Visa Requirements Are You Referring?

Back at the counter—yes, New Zealand visas, check! However, there was something more. Something was nagging in the back of my brain. As I stood there, now blurry-eyed from the effort of reaching into memory for the folder filed away under ‘visas,’ I somehow remembered there was something more. There was something more that New Zealand wanted of me before I was allowed to grace the bottom of my feet with its soil.

"Sir. Sir, can I see your onward plane tickets?

"My what?

"Your onward plane tickets. The tickets that you will use to leave New Zealand.

"Oh. We don't have any.

"Excuse me?"

You can see where this is going. Being, apparently, the most desirable place to live in the entire universe, New Zealand is terrified that someone might arrive in their country and refuse to leave. So, they require you to have an onward plane ticket before they allow you to enter. But we don’t work that way. We didn’t have any sense of how long we were going to be in New Zealand. We certainly didn’t know where we intended to go after we left. We just intended to leave at some point to somewhere else.

This plan was not good enough for New Zealand or, more urgently, the airline representative that was enforcing their draconian visa requirements.

I tried to solve this hitch reasonably, at first.

“But of course we'll leave. I just don't know when. I mean, you know, before our visa expires. Obviously.

“Sir, I can't issue you a boarding pass until I see your onward tickets.”

“Oh."

Where To Now? Or Then?

So, we did what we do worst. We sat down, opened up a laptop, and made some decisions. First, we have to decide where to go. Where do we most want to go? New Zealand. That’s why we’re going there. Hmmm. I guess the question then is, where do we second-most wish to go. Well, Melbourne is lovely this time of year. But we’re already in Melbourne, so that doesn’t make any sense. Okay, we will make the decision the American way: What is the cheapest option?

Survey says… the Cook Islands. You know, Captain Cook (not Captain Hook, he was the guy who fought with the flying, delusional little boys). No, Captain Cook. He’s the guy who discovered—by European standards—half of the islands in the Pacific before finally being killed and possibly eaten by the indigenous population of Hawaii. It turns out there are some islands named after him. Who knew?

But by going to the Cook Islands, we would be traveling in the wrong direction, as my goal in life is never again to cross the Pacific Ocean. It’s so stinking big. Our only hope of not crossing the Pacific Ocean this year is to keep traveling west until we can simply skip over the Atlantic Ocean as though it is hardly there—which in comparison to the Pacific Ocean, it hardly is. 

Have you ever noticed that printed maps of the world kind of ignore the Pacific Ocean, putting half of it on the right side and half of it on the left side? Except that half of it isn’t there? Hawaii and any other sufficiently relevant islands are put in little boxes to show that they exist; otherwise, mapmakers ignore most of the Pacific. Do you know why they do that? Because it’s so stinking big, we’d run out of paper if we printed the Pacific Ocean on every map we made.

Anyway, we were looking to travel west and looking for somewhere with cheap plane tickets. Thank you, internet. That will be Vietnam this time around. And Vietnam is lovely this time of year, or so I assume. We didn’t have time to check. Nor did we have time to check visa requirements. Or local currency, or anything really. We booked five tickets in an online transaction that amounted to, for the Santillos, the highest ratio of dollars-per-minute-of-deliberation ever.

Off to New Zealand, Thank You Very Much

I then carried the laptop, its confirmation page still glowing hot, back to the check-in line, smiling dumbly at the kindly agent. Her name was Charisma. By this point, she had already followed us on social media. And I had seen photos of her engagement, wedding, and honeymoon. Isn’t the internet amazing? Or unsettlingly weird? Possibly both. I congratulated her on her nascent marriage. She said it was going wonderfully. She hoped, politely, that I now had plane tickets to somewhere other than New Zealand. And I did!

Finally, after interminable waiting, non-trivial expense, frustration, and a tinge of anxiety, we were on our way to New Zealand. At this point, we allowed first the gentle hum of the airplane and later the serenity of New Zealand’s peaceful, calm, and welcoming nature to lull us into a sense of quiet complacency. We thought nothing more of flights or visa requirements. We thought only of learning, exploring, and enjoying the company of our friends in that beautiful country.

Ahh.

That lasted for a couple of weeks. It could have lasted forever, except for the visa requirements, of course. Courtesy of those, we had our tickets out of there. The tranquility that is New Zealand just lasted until the plane tickets to Vietnam crept upon us. We said our goodbyes to our friends and to that lovely antipode. 

Did you know that less than a third of the world’s landmass is in the southern hemisphere? And did you further know that only 10 or 12% of the world’s population lives in the southern hemisphere? Crazy, eh? We journeyed across that relatively barren hemisphere, crossing ocean and periodic island. Luckily, we had the use of a giant commercial airliner. As such, our trip from New Zealand, with a layover in Australia, and on to Vietnam took a mere 24 hours, starting at 4:30 AM. If we had to travel by outrigger canoe, as the Polynesians did when they settled New Zealand initially, or by tall ship as the Europeans, it would have taken much longer. And probably wouldn’t have offered back-to-back movies. Or air conditioning. Despite the modern-day conveniences and taking into account our modern wimpy standards, it was a long day.

When we finally arrived in Vietnam—11:30 PM in their time zone—we were told to get back on the plane and leave the country.

Visa On Arrival, Please

I doubted they meant it. Mostly, I doubted because that wouldn’t be any fun at all. We had been traveling for a full day through six time zones. We were what you might describe as ‘exhausted and looking forward to sleeping.’ Thus, the prospect of getting back on the plane from which we’d just stumbled and flying back from whence we came was, I repeat, not fun.

And did “going back” mean going back to Australia where we had our layover or all the way back to New Zealand? Did we still have a valid visa to enter Australia (where we had traveled a few weeks earlier)? Did we have a valid visa to return to New Zealand since we had told them we were leaving for Vietnam? Too many questions.

Maybe we heard wrong? After all, this whole conversation was happening through surgical masks, headscarves, and blearily dry eyes. Oh, and a significant language barrier, as well. 

No, the origin of this whole “we don’t love you, now go away” sentiment was that we didn’t have a visa to enter the country of Vietnam. 

You see, I think I mentioned earlier that in the Santillo family, we traditionally acquire a visa and then buy plane tickets. It’s a Step (1) then Step (2) kind of procedure, and it’s worked really well many times. However, this time, for reasons that were entirely within our control and completely my fault, but for which I still do not want to claim culpability, we were sitting on the floor of an airport buying plane tickets to Vietnam in a frantic rush so that we might have the grace of filling our lungs with New Zealand air. As such, we did not follow Step (1) and then Step (2). We just did Step (2) and then blissfully forgot about Step (1). 

Remember how pleasant and relaxing New Zealand is? How it can lull one into complacency if one is not too careful? Yeah, so we didn’t do much visa research while we were there, either. Somewhere along the line, we half-heartedly poked the keys of our laptop enough to read the words, “Vietnam, visa on arrival,” and figured that everything would be just fine.

I don’t want to argue semantics too thoroughly, or it might seem like I’m trying to escape responsibility (which I kind of am), but the term ‘visa on arrival’ kind of implies that you can get a visa after you’ve arrived. Don’t you think? Anyway, it obviously didn’t appear that way to anyone else because we were the only idiots—I mean passengers—on our flight who failed to navigate the Vietnam visa requirements. That made two countries in a row. Super.

And the irony is—I love irony, at least to the extent that it makes a story more interesting:

1. On our way to NZ, an airline representative made sure that we complied with their visa requirements, but no government official seemed to care when we arrived in NZ.
2. On the other hand, in Vietnam, where they definitely cared about our visa, the airline representatives didn’t say a word about it when boarding the plane in Sydney. 

Oh well.

Apparently, a visa on arrival in Vietnam requires that you have some type of letter prepared in advance by someone, I don’t even know who. They felt very strongly about having this letter. I offered to write one myself. That was deemed inadequate and not funny.

Eventually, one gentleman in a uniform felt pity for my three children, who were sleeping across a row of chairs nearby, and suggested maybe there was an alternative. There’s always an alternative. Right? As long as you have… As long as you have… As long as you have… You guessed it! A pocketful of US currency! I believe his exact words were, “How much money do you have?”

Don’t Call It a Bribe

I don’t know the cultural norms in Vietnam. Heck, I don’t even know the visa requirements. I know that in America, it would be rude to ask someone how much money he has. It’s simply not something you do. It’s inappropriate. Most of the time, I don’t even know how much money I have because I consider it too gauche to ask myself.

Just imagine you walk into the DMV, take a number, stand in line, tell the teller how much money you have in your wallet, pay seventy-four percent of that amount, and get your license on the spot. That would be weird, right?

However, at this moment, it was quickly becoming apparent that in Vietnam, there is a method that would allow us to stay in the country, which was fortunate since the kids were still sleeping on rows of seats just around the corner somewhere. However, it was not so clear that I would be wholly pleased with the process. I suppose that is fair. They weren’t wholly pleased that I had arrived in their country without a visa. So, I guess turnabout is fair play.

After the inquiry into the monetary contents of my pockets, I looked puzzled for a bit, tilted my head to the side, and mumbled, “Some.” That was true—though not very specific or helpful. I was rapidly doing math in my head, all kinds of math: basic arithmetic, statistics, actuarial computations, algebra, trigonometry, all sorts. Most of it didn’t help calculate the right answer to his question. It didn’t occur to me to tell him the truth, but I’m also not well equipped to lie. So, I kept stalling and doing math in my head, moving on to calculus and differential equations—which were never my forte. 

It seemed that specifying too small of a number would put us back on the plane. Here are some possible scenarios I considered:

Me: “I have five dollars.”

Man in Uniform: “Thank you for visiting Vietnam. Get back on the plane.”

I also concluded specifying too much money would be a mistake. Kind of like this:

Me: “I have $1.2 million in small, unmarked bills and a similar sum in gold sewn into the lining of my jacket.” (You see now, why I had to take my winter clothes out of my carry-on bag in order to keep it under seven kilograms.)

Man in Uniform: “Sir, please come with us.”

Even a middling answer seemed fraught.

Me: “I have a few thousand bucks. Why do you ask?”

Man in Uniform: “That’s perfect. That’s how much it costs to get a visa: a few thousand bucks.

Me: “How much exactly?

The Man: “Yes.”

Eventually, my puzzled expression, mental math, and mumbled, “some,” was relieved by the guard asking a more specific question, “Do you have a thousand US dollars?”

If nothing else, my stalling seemed to have bracketed the question. I made various noises and non-verbal movements with my head and face–still wrapped up like a bank robber in honor of coronavirus prevention– which were probably interpreted as a “yes.” After all, with the kids sleeping across two or three uneven seats, I would eventually save that much on chiropractor bills if I could just get us out of there. 

He then quoted me seven hundred and sixty dollars, a number fully four times the standard cost of a 30-day visa. However, the pain of that number still weighed less than the thought of getting back on the plane; we were getting somewhere. He then explained that the visa would only last for 15 days. That seemed okay since I wasn’t enjoying my stay in Vietnam so far anyway—the sooner we leave, the better, I thought. Except, not tonight. He then said maybe he could give us a discount for the kids. That would be great! Like half off? No, like a couple of bucks off. Oh. 

I wasn’t going to win this negotiation. Are you familiar with the term BATNA? It means your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. It refers to what you’re stuck with if you can’t come to terms. When you are buying a car, your BATNA is not getting the car. In my case, my BATNA was getting back on that plane, walking away from the cost of the airplane tickets that brought us to Vietnam, and probably having to pay an additional fare to return from whence we came. It was a terrible alternative. And the Man in the Uniform here knew it. 

The Cost of Stupidity

That, my friends, is the cost of stupidity: $740.

By not properly researching and complying with one country’s visa requirements, a person then hurriedly purchases plane tickets to another country, thereby failing to research those visa requirements adequately, as well. And poof, there you are in the middle of the night, feeling a little bit zombie-like, looking at two options: Go back in that big metal tube, or hand over the money that you had hoped might one day put your children through college. Oh, well. 

On the upside, after we finally agreed to their price, they moved us to the front to the line, filled out the paperwork for us (including our signatures), and had us out the door in a matter of minutes. 

Vietnam was a great place to visit; please see our travelogues below. Everyone should come here to learn about this great country. That said, we highly recommend that you first learn all there is to know about visa requirements.