Day 291/292: Intramurous & Chaos

The last two days in Manila ended up being just as stressful, unfortunately. Made the best of it....

Sunday was intended for relaxation at the hotel while we created claims for our travel insurance and finalized plans for Vietnam. Sadly, the wifi was so bad in our rooms that it continually prevented us from making any progress on our claims and had us re-entering information over-and-over in failed attempts. On top of this, we noticed that Mary's Visa for Vietnam had not been approved yet. This was a big problem since it was Saturday and there was no guarantee that her visa would be completed in time for her flight. So we set out into the city to try and find some stable Wifi.

We started in Intramuros, the old Spanish district of Manilla. After 2 hours and three separate cafes that all had Wifi outages, we finally ended up at an Asian fusion restaurant with a good connection. Mary completed one of our insurance claims and Kieran built a plan for the visa. Our best plan was to visit the Vietnamese embassy in Manila as soon as it opened on Monday to have our issue resolved.

After our food and research, we decided to walk around Intramuros and Rizal Park. Rizal Park was a beautiful green space tucked into the city and it was (mostly) free of people trying to sell you miscellaneous things. We enjoyed the Japanese garden and a friendly kitty.

Still feeling stressed out from the day, we went back to the hotel and ordered another Phillipino staple, Imsala Salang. It was some easy comfort for what was about to come.

Unable to sleep, Mary decided to look up Kieran’s VISA; ends up the VISA only allowed him to enter from 10/16 to 10/27. The typhoon totally moved us out of our original dates!

In a panic we decide to locate a third party site that grants VISAs which we heard it a legit thing…after looking online and checking Trust Pilot, we pulled the trigger on Vietnam Pro VISA. At 12am we worked with them over WhatsApp to get the paperwork in order. They are super responsive and helping us with all sorts of issues.

On Monday, we have to accept we will either make it into Vietnam or not. We go to Makati area to work with a little wifi and Kieran hits the doctor one more time to get some more paperwork. At 12:00pm we received our visas!!! We head to the airport and now are sweating the legitimacy of the visas. We wait in an hour long line to check in, arrive at the counter, and the lady starts to check them.

She says “Hold on” and goes to the back 💀💀💀 She comes back after 15 minutes and says, “Sorry about that; we saw the entry date was for 10/29 and confirmed that your flight lands that day at 1:10am 🥴

Y’all we checked those bags and went to the gate 4 hours before the flight. Enjoyed cards and beer. Flight time! We land in Hanoi at 1:10am and get to immigration (the next test). We get to the immigration officer and he looks at our visas. Says, “You need to go to the counter over there. Come back.”

We get to the counter and we figure out you need a visa stamp. We show the guy, and he’s like “you don’t need that, you have an E-VISA.” We tell him the guard sent us over here. He stamps it for the hell of it, we go back to the guard, and finally made it to Viet-fucking-nam.

At the end of the day, we believe we probably paid a shady service that bribes immigration officials to put out paperwork in the front of the line. It’s the sketchiest and riskiest thing we’ve ever done…for now 🫣

Food:

Spots:
IntramurosOkumaya devam et