Visa Fiasco: New Plan

Just to bring down your heightened alert mode, we didn’t actually bribe a police officer.  In fact, we didn't actually know how this guy was related to the police station, but we think he worked for one of the officers as kind of a ‘scrub.’ 

It all started when we were making our plans to go to Angkor Wat, Cambodia.  We discovered that our visas were only single entry to Vietnam versus multiple entry.  This was a big deal because if we left Vietnam we wouldn’t be able to come back and our international flight home left from Saigon.  We discovered that we could relatively easily correct our visa… or so we thought.  (Why is everything harder than what it seems?)

After going to the Canadian Embassy (our visas were issued in Ottawa) and them directing us to the Vietnam Immigration Services, we were given a form and instructed to get the signature of someone at our hotel and the local police station.  Easy enough, right?  WRONG.  (hehe, sounds familiar, eh?)

It was quite easy to get the signature from our hotel, but the local police station was much more difficult.  We initially went to police station and they instructed us to get the reservation confirmation from our hotel.  So we went back to our hotel and they had not input us into the system when we checked in so we could only take our receipt for one paid night to the police station.  A man sitting outside of the police station waved us over and said he’ll help us get the stamp from the police if we pay him 400,000 Dong (equal to $20).  Eric didn’t trust this guy, and didn’t want to be involved in any bribes.  I didn’t see it as a bribe.  I saw it as being necessary in order to get anything done here.  So we agreed that if he could get the police to sign our form by 4:00pm today then we would pay him.  That man tried his darnedest but his efforts didn’t pay off.

In fact, after an hour of waiting in the police station, the police chief came back with our paperwork and started yelling at the receptionist in Vietnamese about our forms while we were sitting right there.  After he left, she said today’s boss is grumpy and that we should come back in the morning when we have a happy boss. Okay… we came back the next morning and the new boss still would not sign our form either.  It was ridiculous!  We were given no explanation either! 

So we ended up cancelling our trip to Cambodia, wishing we would’ve just paid $140 per person to get a travel agency to change our visas.  Lesson to be had… nothing is ever as easy as it seems when traveling and there’s a reason that travel agencies offer visa services because the local police station are nin-com-poops!

We weren’t going to let this sour our time though and wanted to make the best of our extra days in Vietnam.  Since we couldn't leave the country, we booked a trip immediately to Phu Quoc island and northern Vietnam in the capital, Hanoi, experiencing one of the seven natural wonders of the world, Ha Long Bay!  But I’ll leave that adventure for another blog.