Pre-dawn departure

At 4:00 am Tuesday morning I let myself quietly out of my apartment to catch a taxi to Noi Bai airport. I had prearranged (and prepaid) the cab ride a couple days earlier with a neighborhood travel agent named Nga, who had smiled indulgently at my paranoia in wanting to leave so early for the airport. It's only a 45-minute cab ride, after all, and my flight wasn't leaving until 6:00 am. But if I learned nothing else from twenty years as a computer consultant, I learned this: paranoia is good. Paranoia is cheap insurance.

At 4:00 am Hanoi's streets are as quiet as they're going to get, but there's still a surprising amount of activity: small knots of men smoking cigarettes and conversing in low voices, bands of teenagers roaring up and down the street on motorbikes, old women headed who knows where, and here and there a street kitchen still serving bowls of chicken feet to hungry night owls. I set my travel bag and laptop back in the shadows to minimize temptation for the motorbike gangs and waited. Several taxis cruised past, but none of them stopped. I saw a motorscooter transporting a headless pig. About 200 pounds of pale meat was sprawled on its spine in the footwell, cantilevered hindfeet inches from the pavement on one side and forefeet jutting out perilously close to the street on the other side.

When I'd waited 15 minutes with no pickup, I used my mobile phone to call the taxi number Nga had given me. Somebody answered and said something in Vietnamese. I explained my situation in English. They replied something in Vietnamese and hung up. So I called my emergency number—Nga's mobile phone—and woke up Nga. While I was explaining the situation to her, a Morning Taxi cab pulled up directly in front of me. "Oh, wait...here's a cab now. Would you make sure the driver understands that the fare has been prepaid?" I handed my mobile to the driver who had a brief conversation with Nga and handed it back. "Airport?" he asked. "Vâng (yes)," I replied. He helped me load my bags into the cab and we started for the airport.

Da Lat was still over 900 miles away, but already the air was starting to feel cooler to me as we sped through the dim streets, silent now except when the driver leaned on his horn—not so much, I believe, to warn the occasional lone motorbike we passed as to wake up any layabed who might be trying to sleep on the driver's shift. As we were crossing the river, my mobile phone rang. It was Nga. "Does your cab say Noi Bai Taxi on the side?" she asked me. "No," I told her. "It says Morning Taxi."

"I arranged the pickup with Noi Bai Taxi. Their driver just called and is waiting in front of your apartment."

"I thought you confirmed everything on the phone with this driver."

"Yeah. He tricked you."

"He tricked me?"

"Yeah. He tricked us both. He told me he was with Noi Bai Taxi. What do you want to do? Do you want me to talk to him?"

I glanced at my watch. It was almost 5:00. "No. Let's leave it alone until he's gotten me to the airport." I had been wondering why the driver had switched on his meter when we started out. Now in my head I start running through a scenario where I'm counting down the minutes to takeoff while explaining to a non-English-speaking policeman why I'm refusing to pay the taxi driver who delivered me to the airport.

A minute later the driver pulls onto the shoulder, rolls up behind a stopped taxi, and sits there idling his engine. Now what the hell…? A woman in a conical bamboo hat steps out of the shadows, walks around to the driver's window, and sells him some kind of ticket. He pulls back onto the highway. A minute later we arrive at a toll booth where the driver hands the ticket he just bought from a roadside vendor to the toll taker, who tears the ticket and returns the stub. The mysterious Orient!

At the airport it's clear the driver is hoping for some cash, but instead I write out the name, address, and phone number of the travel agency and do my best to get him to understand that he'll have to collect his money from them. To my surprise, he takes the piece of paper I've given him and leaves without an argument. A good thing because the airport is crowded and I reach my gate only 5 minutes before boarding begins. While we're boarding I get another call from Nga. "Did you pay the driver?" she asks me.

"No," I say. "I paid him nothing."

"He just came back to the agency and asked to be paid."

"Are you going to pay him?"

"No," she said. "I'm not. He's a tricker."