Day one in Nha Trang, from a dawn bowl at Incheon to a waiting taxi

The tray came with three little brass bowls and I put them down by the window before I put down my bag. Outside was still black. A few runway lights, a tail fin somewhere in the dark, and my own reflection in the glass with a camera strapped to its chest. I had been awake since some hour I did not want to name. The camera said three in the morning, which was wrong, because the camera had already decided it lived in Vietnam. Korean clocks were two hours ahead of it all morning. So call it five.

I was the first person in the food court who was not staff. That is the thing about a dawn flight from Incheon. You get the whole building to yourself and a faint feeling that you are trespassing. The meal was rice, a stone pot of something red and hot, and a side dish that looked like beef cooked with vegetables. I am not going to guess the names. I paid for it and I would pay for it again. It was the last Korean food I would have as a person who lived in Korea, and I did not think about that until the pot was half empty.

I ate slowly. There was nowhere to be yet. The stone pot kept the stew hot long after I stopped caring about it being hot. The bowl of rice went first, then the beef, then I sat scraping the bottom of the pot with a long spoon while the one other man in the room did the same thing three tables away. Neither of us looked up.

Talking to a camera in an empty gate

I walked out to the gate with earphones hanging off my collar and nobody to put them in for. The seating area was rows of brown leather chairs and every single one was free. A television on a stand at the end of the row was showing itself. A potted palm. Doors with signs I did not read. It felt like a hotel lobby after the hotel had closed.

So I sat down and talked to the camera. I do this a lot on days like this and I never know afterwards what I said. From the frames it looks like I told it something serious, then something less serious, then I stared at the ceiling for a while. Mostly I remember the quiet. The kind of quiet where you hear the air conditioning think.

Out the window the sky started to go from black to a deep blue, and there was a plane parked nose to the glass with its lights on. I have no idea if it was mine. I would like to say it was. The flight was Vietjet, which I do know. I remember a window. I remember nothing about the seat.

What I did in the last half hour before boarding was open the laptop and check on some work I had left running. Four terminal windows, Korean text, an agent still chewing through a task list I had given it the night before. I sat there in a dead airport at dawn reading logs. This is who I am now, apparently. The palm in the corner watched me do it.

Then I closed the lid, put the earphones in properly at last, and walked down the bridge.

Glass, heat, and a row of silver trolleys

The next frame the camera gives me is Cam Ranh International Airport, a little before noon by the Vietnam clock. That is the whole flight, gone. I slept, I think. The hall I walked into was all glass on one side, white wall on the other, and outside the glass was the kind of light that makes you squint from inside an air conditioned building. Green grass, a dark low building across a road, a red sign I could not read from that far.

What I noticed first was the trolleys. A long silver line of them, nose to tail, parked along the window like they were waiting for a flight of their own. I counted about thirty. Nobody was using one. Nobody was there at all, apart from a cleaning cart parked by the door and, a bit later, two people in uniform under the ceiling lights who looked like they were on a break. My backpack was on and my jacket was on and I was already regretting the jacket.

I had done the arrival paperwork in my head a hundred times and the real thing took less time than any of the rehearsals. That is usually how it goes. I stood in the hall afterwards with one hand on the back of my neck, looking up at the ceiling the way you do when you have just been handed a new country and are not sure where to put it.

She was already on the other side

Here is the part I did not have to plan. My girlfriend had booked a taxi from the city side, and she had come out with it to Cam Ranh to meet me. So there was no queue at a counter, no bargaining, none of the airport arrival I had been bracing for. I walked out through the glass doors into the heat and she was there. The taxi was there. My whole first hour in Vietnam was handled by someone who had already been living in it.

The ride into Nha Trang was already sorted before I landed. I sat in the back with the jacket finally off and the window down for the first minute, then up again when the air conditioning won. Trees, then water on one side, then more trees. I did not film much of it. I was looking, not filming.

I remember the bed that first night and not the room. I remember putting the chest camera on a table and thinking that it had been running since a food court in Incheon at five in the morning, Korean time, and that it now lived in the right time zone and so did I.

Day one. Not much happened, and everything did.

Five days later the scooter and I went south for the first time, and a herd of cows had the road.

The numbers

Route

Incheon International Airport → Cam Ranh International Airport

Airline

Vietjet, dawn departure

Landed

A little before noon, Vietnam time

Airport to the city

Pre-booked taxi into Nha Trang, arranged from the city side before I landed

Flown on

Tuesday, 18 August 2026