It has been over five years since I’ve made the 24-plus-hour journey to Vietnam. A trip I once made three times a year. Many things have changed. Qatar no longer offers the Doha to Da Nang route, a casualty of the Pandemic, and it apparently has entered a new partnership with American Airlines.
This new partnership ensured that our longest leg, fifteen hours to Doha, would be done on an, and this is just my personal belief, a far inferior carrier to Qatar’s more glamorous flight experience.
WiFi went from free to $40 per device. The food was okay, the lamb stew was surprisingly delicious, but it was less frequent and mostly just meh.
The onboard entertainment was again okay, but nothing as robust and varied as Qatar offers. The quarters are more crammed, Qatar has fewer seats per plane, giving them the most legroom in the business, as they often quote. I hate that my country’s namesake carrier would be so disappointing. But there you have it. American-based carriers traded profits for comfort and quality long ago.
The Atlantic was another noticeable difference on our route. The massive Airbus Qatar usually operates on this leg, taking a sweeping northern arc over Iceland, Scotland, Scandinavia, Russia, and Türkiye, before settling down in Doha. Our American flight trudged due east across the Atlantic, crossing into Europe over Porto, before dropping slightly south, clipping North Africa near Tunis, and following the Mediterranean toward the Levant. South of Cypress, we deviated further south, entering Egyptian airspace just west of Alexandria, crossed the Nile at El Quseyya as we veered east, crossing the Red Sea and the expanse of the Arabian Desert and Saudi Arabia, before touching down in Doha.
Dinner was served shortly after takeoff, the Lamb stew was the star of the show here, and I settled into Timothy Chalamet’s A Complete Unknown, before dozing off into a hazy, uncomfortable sleep over most of the Atlantic.
The flight was full, which is usually the case on this leg. It’s the route to the world in many ways, as Doha and the Middle East in general have become a massive connection hub for many travelers leaving the U.S. In a real modern sense, all routes lead to Doha and Dubai.
The flight from the U.S. to Doha is always incredibly diverse, as people like us will transit there before dispersing to their end destinations. As I sit here now, halfway through the flight, I can count over a dozen languages being spoken around me. Very soon, English will become an oddity, and I will revert to a childlike state where everything is new, and most things around me will be, for all intents and purposes, unknown.
I will get in cars when nudged, climb on motorbikes at random, and will be herded to and fro in an almost mystical state of bliss. I remember the complete lack of mental power I once utilized in completing daily tasks like what was for dinner, or where we would be going in the afternoon. Diem ran the show, and I, in all its wonder and excitement, was merely along for the ride. I can’t wait to fall back into that arrangement.
Bill Gates is famous for his wardrobe consistency as he claims it’s a waste of mental function to choose one’s clothes daily; there are far better uses of your limited daily computing power, as he often claims. Well, Bill, go through your days making no decisions, hell, go through your day being led around like a toddler. That’s the real savior of the mind. To be a child again. Where everything is new, even going to procure groceries requires the learning of new skills, it’s a state of being I’ve only ever experienced in one place. A place I will be again soon, only this time it won’t be as foreign as it once was. Or maybe it will. It’s been four years since we moved from Da Nang to Atlanta. The excitement of the return is building. Will it feel like home as it once did, or will the dynamic nature of the burgeoning economy be too much to sustain what was?
One of the aspects of living in Vietnam that was often a more melancholy component was the rapid nature of the economy. Businesses came and went with enough fury to make one’s head spin. I’ve spoken of it before, Vietnam is in the midst of a renaissance. It is now that the country is building its brands that may stand the test of generational time. But to have an institution such as a famous nationwide chain in any sector, which is, from the outset, Vietnamese, is a very new thing. Most of its multi-unit businesses are foreign-born, but the homegrown name brands are beginning to take hold. Our children will be the first to visit institutions with their children that we visited with them. It’s a concept taken for granted in the U.S., generational business, wealth, and prosperity. These things have only taken root in Vietnam over the past few decades. It has been an incredible thing to see. It’s a world where things aren’t yet taken for granted, and everyone participating is simply happy to be a part of what is felt across the country as the dawn of a golden age of Vietnam. For more information, I refer you to an article I wrote in 2020, The Year of the Dragon. For 2020 was Vietnam’s coming-of-age year.
The sun’s intensity was hard to express when we landed in Doha. Not a cloud in sight and a blistering 96 degrees of humidless heat. As usual in Doha, we disembarked down the skywalk and entered the gleaming palace of all things loved by man. Gold shops, duty-free Lamborghinis and McLarens, and the finest spirits the world has to offer are all available in this temple of steel, concrete, and fine woods that has risen from the barren desert floor.
The only airport I know of that has an indoor forest, walls made of water, and an all-glass train that whisks commuters to their destined gates. It’s a palace of commerce and transportation built by an endless oil supply. But I am not complaining, there’s nowhere else I’d rather transit through than Hamad International Airport.
We perused the finest items the world has to offer, settled into a sushi restaurant for a late lunch, and otherwise made our way to our gate. As is usually the case in Doha, we were allowed to board over an hour early and were tucked into our row long before takeoff.
By 8 pm Doha time, I had a scotch and Stella to aid with both digestion and sleep, and contemplated a long nap before our early arrival in Saigon. But it was not to be. The most I would acquire would be a few moments of a state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, a liminal space between worlds as we crossed the Indian subcontinent. Six more hours to Saigon.
We crossed the Indian Ocean between India and Thailand in the pitch of night. However, as we reached Cape Negrais, the sun began to pierce the horizon. At first, a soft ethereal glow, then a pastel wash of lavenders, pinks, and oranges. It could mean only one thing. We had reached Southeast Asia. Some 30 hours after we stepped into Hartsfield-Jackson, though almost three days later on the calendar.
Long-haul travel has a funny way of confusing the mind and destroying one’s rooted sense of awareness in space and time. There will be an adjustment period. But I knew that. I simply sat waiting to land in a quiet reflection. It was going to be a head-spinning tour-de-force, a forced march as it were. There are so many friends and family to see, and there is so little precious time. So much distance to cover.
I didn’t fully know the itinerary and liked it that way. The only things I wanted to do were to visit an old tailor friend in Hoi An for some fresh suits and visit the ancient ruins of My Son. A place I had booked a trip to see before, but the pandemic caused its cancellation.
Dawn had completely consumed the night by the time we reached Bangkok, though the world was thick in a dense, infinite sea of clouds. We would be landing soon. And I couldn’t wait to get off the plane. 30 hours of sitting at gates and being crammed in like a sardine was beginning to weigh on my mental health. Additionally, something was becoming very ripe in my general vicinity, and I was beginning to think it might be me. Something or someone desperately needed a shower.
To go back to where it all began.
