He who orders pizza from room service in Hanoi deserves whatever he gets
We’re back now in Hanoi, having spent last night in a junk on Halong bay. This was extremely fun - cruising around, kayaking, checking out caves etc. - until Rach came down with horrible food poisoning after dinner last night. So this evening we decided to order up room service because: Food Poisoning! Rach is only eating plain rice and if she feels really adventurous she might try a couple of chips. They can’t possibly stuff that up. I decided to go with temporary insanity and order a pizza, because room service demands either a BLT or pizza. I felt that I’d have a better chance of getting an edible pizza, so I ordered a medium “Meaty”…
Everything we ordered was delivered cold, which is perfectly understandable. The lift can take a very long time to arrive, and the 2 flights of stairs to our floor is just epic when you’re burdened with a heavy tray containing 3 plates of food and a 330mL can of drink. So obviously the temperature of the rice, fries and pizza is going to drop by a good 50-60 degrees. That goes without saying.
What I’m not quite so sure about is how, between leaving the kitchen and entering our room, the pizza got quite so fucked up. The base burnt. Not a little crispy around the edges, or burnt where the bottom contacted the glowing bricks of a wood fired oven, but burnt evenly on top of the base, underneath the toppings. That’s a bit of a feat for a prankster porter with only one hand free. He is obviously skilled.
Extremely skilled, as he also managed to re-wrap the slices of salami in their slim little rings of salami paper.
So it turns out that I’m a little pissed off with our hotel: Viet Anh. I’m a little less pissed off about the food issue, as the girl who organized it (whether she’s the cook or the person who called out to a greasy spoon somewhere to pick this stuff up is unclear) just dropped in with a plate of orange wedges, some soup for Rach (who they are quite aware is sick considering her state when we arrived), an apology and assurance that we won’t be charged for the pizza. This was unprompted, except perhaps for the tray left outside our room containing left over slices of evenly scorched bread, so I guess I’m ok with our culinarily inept but beautiful and caring friends.
What I’m not happy about is the nagging feeling that the hotel is somehow engaged in dodgy dealings at the expense of their guests. Viet Anh reviewed quite well in Rach’s Lonely Planet, receiving a “reviewer’s pick” box. So they’re quite busy and didn’t actually manage to turn my initial web-based reservation (over a week ago) into anything tangible. They took a couple of days to reply that the hotel was full, but that they’d recently opened the “Viet Anh 2″ hotel nearbye, which had availability. I replied about an hour later asking for the address of this hotel and agreeing to a room there, waited 2 days for a response and eventually called on the morning of our flight to Hanoi. I finally received a response to my followup email this afternoon.. After spending 2 nights at their hotel, a night on a boat and finally returning to their hotel.
So they’re flakey on email. Not so surprising, it took about 10 emails and 3 weeks to organize our internal flights through a different group. Moral of the story: if you’re trying to organize travel in Vietnam, just use the phone.
Here’s what makes me uneasy: The “Viet Anh Hotel” has reviewed well in Lonely Planet. So their business picks up. They probably have to start turning people away (perhaps people whose emails get lost and they end up just showing up at the door). So they use the money from their increased business to buy another building around the corner, do a quick renovation job and open this up as the “Viet Anh 2 Hotel”. Unfortunately, this hotel is nowhere near as nice as the original, nobody would go there given the choice. So they book people in to Viet Anh 1 and then, when they arrive, say “Oh, so sorry, this hotel full, but there is room around the corner at our second hotel, you stay there one night, then room free here”.
Of course, when I say “when they arrive”, what I mean is “when we arrived”. Because, it happened to us. We ended up in the vastly inferior #2, with a shared bathroom out in the hall, shower situated directly above toilet, wipe room and toilet down with towel after showering. In what is supposed to be a 2 star hotel. Our bathroom on the freaking boat was better than that.
Then, the next afternoon: “Sorry, other guests didn’t check out, so you have to stay another night in the portapotty room…”
Now we’re back, and happily have an ensuite! Hurrah! Happily for all involved really, if I’d turned up this afternoon with a potentially dying girlfriend and been greeted with “So sorry” I would have breathed flame, sulphur and screaming demonic wasps over the fuckers.