I’m currently in Vietnam with Ben and Clare: I’ve been to Hà Nội and Hà Long, and at the moment I’m in Ho Chi Minh City.
The flight here was interesting. I have a severe peanut allergy. It’s recently got to the point where being in the vicinity of peanuts causes a reaction. In light of the sad recent case of Natacha Ednan-Laperouse and an 11.5 hour flight coming up with Vietnamese Airlines I boarded the plane with plenty of safe snacks and cards explaining my allergy in Vietnamese.
I looked for an option online to let the airline know about my allergy in advance, but there was none. The moment I stepped on the plane I let a hostess know and requested no peanuts be served on the flight. She seemed confused, so I told another hostess, and finally a third so I could be certain the message had been received by someone.
It had not.
Within 30 minutes of take off staff were merrily chucking bags of peanuts at passengers, wether they asked for them or not. I asked them to stop, to which their reply was “oh yes, no nuts for you”. No - no peanuts for ANYONE! There was a complete lack of understanding of why this was a potentially fatal safety issue and one steward I tried to explain it to walked away from me laughing and saying “no, no, no” and refused to make an announcement asking other passengers to stop opening packets.
Ben was becoming upset because she could see a rash start covering my chest, neck and face. She is one of the strongest women I know: I have never seen her tearful before, but she was in this situation because she thought I was going to die and there was nothing she could do to help me. We recognised that the mistake (the serving of peanuts) had already happened and couldn’t be undone, but wanted to make sure our plans B, C and D were foolproof. The staff had no idea of the potential need for an emergency landing. Their ‘medical box’ contained plasters and out of date loperamide. They couldn’t tell us where the defibrillator was. Looked at us blankly when we asked if there were non-nutty seats to move to.
I spent the final 11 hours of the flight dosed up on antihistamines and physically uncomfortable with a mild allergic reaction, but the mild nature of it was better luck than judgement. Mentally though, I was entirely unable to sleep because of the paranoia I felt each time I heard the rustle of a packet which may have been peanuts from earlier. A sleepy itch wasn’t just an itch: it felt like the first symptom of anaphylactic shock in my panicked mind. The cabin staff had demonstrated I couldn’t trust them with my safety, so I clutched my adrenaline all the way to Hà Nội and hoped something of what I’d been saying to the cabin crew had sunk in.
Majorly grumpy after walking away from the Peanut Incident and waiting an age for my backpack to arrive on the luggage carousel, Ben and I got a cab to the hotel we’d booked. We arrived after 45 minutes, which was remarkably good time because my research said the journey would take 2-3 hours. We checked in to the hotel, bedded down for a power nap, and then it hit me - we were still in Hà Nội, not Hà Long. Faced with 2 choices: stay in Hà Nội until our flight to Ho Chi Minh the next morning, or squeeze in the briefest of trips to Hà Long and meet Clare there as planned, we opted for the latter, stayed in an amazing 5* hotel in a 15th floor room with a panoramic view of the bay, and had the most brutally effective massage of my life (seriously, it was like BDSM with aromatherapy). Unfortunately it emerged that there had been further confusion when I tried to make plans to meet up with Clare: she had left Hà Long fo Hà Nội that morning.
There was further narrowly avoided disaster with catching our flight from Hà Nội to Ho Chi Minh. The hotel receptionist was adamant that we could leave at 7:00 to get a 9:40 flight. Dubious, we booked a shuttle for 6:00 instead, and even then cut it incredibly fine. At one point on the journey I resigned myself to having to renounce my claim to have never missed a flight, Clare had checked in at a sensible time and was on the verge of giving up on us and going to the gate, but somehow we made it!!
I’m off out now to explore the Vietnamese capital.
Love Emily x
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