How to deal with difficult situations in SE Asia.

If you're in a sticky situation in SE Asia, never lose your temper or start shouting. Also, if you know that you need something from the other party (e.g. non-cheaty price, your ticket, a visa), best way forward is giving them an acceptable way out. For instance, you know you've paid for a service but they try to ask for the price again (because they know that the Western tourist usual can afford this), state kindly that you have paid already - maybe they could check their papers again or call a colleague to find out.

What happened to us was that stuff started going missing from our room here in Huế at Sports2 Hotel. First our camera cable disappeared and we checked our belongings, carefully noting that everything else were in their proper places. When we went down for breakfast we asked the reception if we had left the cable by the computers the previous day, but they had not seen it. So we went back to our room, which had been cleaned by the housekeeping whilst we were at breakfast. Boyfriend then wanted to cut his fingernails - just to find out that our Swiss army knife had been taken from his zipped up rucksack pocket.

After checking the whole room again, I went down to reception to inform them of our problem and to ask if they could ask from the housekeeping if the knife was accidentally taken with our dirty towels (see! a respectable way out!) Soon we get a phone call informing us that the camera cable was found from the first floor balcony hanging on a potted plant - maybe we accidentally forgot it there? Perhaps, we said, knowing that we had never been on the first floor.

After a couple more inquiries and hours of waiting and not losing our calm in front of the hotel staff, the knife had not showed up. So we packed our belongings and checked out. There was no way of staying in a hotel where we could not trust anything to stay in our room. Obviously we did not say this aloud, and we did not point a blaming finger even at this stage. After getting our passports back from reception (this is what you do in all hotels in Vietnam) we informed the reception that unfortunately we would have to go to the police station to obtain a police report for our travel insurance claim - it was after all an expensive knife (half our combined weekly travel budget) - but hopefully this would not cause any problems to them (oh I can be so polite - however, this nevertheless caused the first signs of genuine interest in the receptionist with our minor plight). We left our contact details with the receptionist in case the housekeeping would find the knife.

And funny that, an hour later we got a phone call informing us that the knife is waiting for us in the reception. It had been found "behind the bed" (where we knew for sure it had not been). We thanked and smiled, obviously we were the foolish ones here not finding the knife from there. So in the end it was us who possibly lost our faces not being able to locate a knife in a room, but none of the staff at the hotel were shamed in front of us. So keeping our calm, being polite and offering a way out (finding the knife "from our room" after our departure) got us our knife back. What a day it has been though!