As you can see from our photo, we managed to cross the border into Vietnam without too much bother. Compared to our Cambodian border crossing, actually, it was a breeze!
We woke up early yesterday morning, all prepped for the journey ahead from having read lots of accounts of the Ha Tien border crossing between Cambodia and Vietnam (it’s only been open a short while, so we tried to get as much info as possible – don’t you love the internet?)
The first stage of our journey was to get from the small seaside town of Kep to the Vietnam border, about an hour ride on a tuktuk. Tuktuks, as I’ve mentioned before, are charming little motorbike-driven vehicles, open-air and perfect for getting around town in short bursts. Not so perfect for traveling in with all your luggage for over an hour, most of the way on a bumpy dirt road, but our driver was a champ and took us all the way to the border (most of the time the tuktuks stop a few kilometers beforehand, and make you pile all your stuff onto motorbikes for the last haul).
Getting through Cambodian customs was no problem – surprisingly. We had to overstay our visas by a day because we could only get 30 days in Vietnam and our flights to Indonesia are on the 2nd of December, but they simply charged us the (official) nominal fee, and even gave us a receipt! Marvelous.
Then we hopped onto the backs of motorbikes and zooted off to the Vietnamese customs area. We filled in our forms and had our visas checked no problem (they don’t issue them at the border), and even got a 50% discount on the scam fee – most people said they had to pay $2 to get their passports back, we only had to pay $1! Bonus.
But then.
To pass over into Vietnam we had to get our visas stamped, and the stamping-visa-man was nowhere to be found. You would think that at a border crossing with only one conceivable restaurant and no other entertainment spots, it would be quite simple to find one man, but no. We waited over an hour (along with a group of ten other people wanting to cross the border) for this one guy to pitch up – never mind that there were at least five others who (surely?) could have stamped our passports. When he finally arrived (no apology) he proceeded to make three phonecalls before getting to our passports. I would have been seething, but I kept thinking that this was the last step before freedom…
And it was! We set off for the Ha Tien Bus Station, about fifteen minutes on the bikes, I think, to catch a 2 hour bus to Rach Gia, from where we would catch a two and a half hour ferry to the island of Phu Quoc (pronounced something like foowark), our home for the next few days.
The bus station was a patch of dirt with a small sign. No ticket office, no schedule and (more worryingly) no buses. We were approached immediately by a skinny guy with long neck hairs claiming to be a tourism official and telling us that we would have to wait two days (two days!) for the next bus, but luckily we’d read up on this bus station and were on red alert for ‘a skinny guy with long neck hairs who speaks good English’! The guy really needs to cut his neck hairs if he wants to further his scamming career.
Just then, as we were wondering what to do, a young Danish guy walked up, eating a baguette. One of the refreshing things about traveling in an Asian country is that you don’t need any excuse to talk to other Westerners – the fact that you both speak English is excuse enough. We started chatting, and it turned out he’d just come from Phu Quoc, and had taken the Ha Tien ferry from just down the road (the one that website forums had warned us was ‘un-seaworthy’ – so you can’t believe everything you read!) Thanks to our serendipitous meeting, we trundled down the road for a few minutes, found not only the ferry but a lovely booking office (hooray!) and managed to get onto the next boat, leaving in 2 hours, just enough time for an ice-cold freshly squeezed lemon juice (my new favourite drink) and to get some local currency and a local SIM card. Should have been enough time to eat, too, but somehow our fried noodles took 45 minutes to prepare, so we had take-away for the ferry. Which was, incidentally, completely seaworthy.
The two hours on the boat passed very pleasantly chatting to two other travelers, and we arrived at the hectic pier of Phu Quoc in one piece (hectic because of the crowds waiting to try and convince you to take their taxi / minibus / motorbike). Luckily we’d booked a ride ahead of time, and slipped out of the madness and into Vietnam.
So far, so beautiful. We’re staying at an eco-friendly resort right on the beach, with stunning sea views on all sides and natural indigenous forest. I’m having a bad health day today (more on that in the next blog), but it is a simply stunning entry into Vietnam.
Any tips for us about Vietnam?
