While my bike is alone (or is it still???) at the border I was wasting my time waiting for the Foreign Affairs section of my consulate to open at 3:30PM.

At the consulate I managed to talk to the men who was probably the chief of the office so things got in motion sooner than if I would have to wait in the long queue that resulted from the fact that the office was closed for effectively two whole working days. However, even then I received the letter that I needed (or at least the thext of it was close to what I required) after everyone else was long gone! The letter has exactly 4 lines of text and they didn’t give me a version in Vietnamese even though most of the staff there is of Vietnamese origin. I was instructed to go to a couple of other offices to have this translated and subsequently notarized. Not as good a help I would expect… :-(

It was too late to get to the border again and the moto-taxi guy wanted at least USD13 to get me there so I decided to take the once-daily bus the next morning for USD4 and went back to the guesthouse where I spend the previous night. They were happy to see me again of course. :-)