I've never been so happy to see a cockroach. There it was scurrying across the floor near my feet, around the empty snack food wrappers. It meant I was on the Saigon-bound train from Nha Trang. Which also meant it would (hopefully) skid into the steamy Vietnamese metropolis somewhere around 4:15am and give me about an hour to jump in a taxi, point it to the airport, and (barely) make my flight back to New York. Hopefully. This was a future chain of events that had to be perfectly synchronized in a Rube Goldbergian fashion. But at this point, I almost didn't care. One near miracle had already occurred today. Would it be divinely gluttonous of me to ask for two?

The day started like the 13 others I'd spent in Vietnam. Crawl out of bed, quaff three or four sugar-laced coffees, and then stroll down to the local market to consume as much as my stomach would allow (pho, chao, spring rolls, more pho). This was my last day here, ending my first trip to Vietnam. I came here to write an article on Saigon and then spent the last week traveling around the country, heading up to Hoi An and then, with Gadling's own Jeremy Kressmann, down to Qui Nhon and Nha Trang, where we ate and drank and rode backs through a leper colony and somehow ended up driving around with strangers in clunky cars late at night.

The day I was leaving Nha Trang, I got myself to the airport early enough to sip coffee in the business class lounge (it was the only ticket available for this Vietnam Airlines flight). My friend Richard Sterling--the so-called "Indiana Jones of gastronomy"--had a big night planned for my last evening in Vietnam: he was going to take me on an adventurous eating tour of Saigon. Then I was going to get approximately two hours of sleep before getting my flight home. I couldn't wait.

Movies and novels often begin by showing the protagonist having what seems like a normal day. They get up, they drink coffee, they take their kids to school, whatever. And then, as the formula usually goes, something happens. Something extraordinary. Usually something bad. In the biz it's called the "inciting incident." My real-life inciting incident occurred somewhere in the middle of my second cup of coffee in the airport lounge.