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I meet odd people. A thread. Other day I met a couple of travellers here. They’d been in Java and were making their way across Bali to the airport. We chatted briefly, and the conversation was so bizarre I thought they were not all there.
I just ran into them again, and they are all there, well kind of. The reason they’re trekking across Bali (from some village outside Yogya) is they’re flying to HCMC on Vietjet next week.
They told me that the first time we met, and when I told them Vietnam was closed and the flight not running, it was 100% news to them. They went to the Vietjet website & verified what I told them. The news was problematic. Having just seen them again, it turns out...
They’re both on 6 month Sosbud visas (a kinda long stay tourist visa, it’s complicated) and that runs out next week. They say they got no cancellation email from Vietjet (totally believable lolz) and have just been working on assumption flight was running.
I asked but hell do you read the news? No, not really. They’re aware of covid19 only in the remotest of sense. Staggering. From what I can gather much of the six months has been on some farm stay thing outside Yogya (I have a very good guess what it grows) & they’re oblivious.
they never have been to an immigration office the entire time. They thought the visa was for six months. Well it is, sort of, but you need to go to immi etc (it’s complicated). All news to them. Ironically COVID & the visa amnesty will save them a bunch of dough, but, wow.
So I’ve given them a number of a visa agent down south to try and sort things out—he’ll earn his money lol. They remind me of a story of two Japanese backpackers who showed us in some battle zone in Israel years ago, with no idea there was a semi war going on. Bonkers.
It just staggers me people can be so removed from the news cycle to have no awareness whatsoever of what has been going on since January. Nuts! And no, not wearing masks—they thought it was weird how everyone was wearing them. 
