In case you were worried about us following our last post, wherein I alluded to a potential problem with overstaying our visas, we are not in a Cambodian prison, nor were we unceremoniously deported and barred from ever re-entering the country. We were fined – $10 US / $13.50 CAD each. Fortunately, Howard still had a crisp $20 US bill in his wallet!
We feel like we’re fairly savvy travelers, so how did this happen?
The official government website, through which you apply for Cambodian e-visas, clearly states a tourist visa is 30 days in length. We very carefully calculated our 29 nights and applied for our Vietnam visa using the 30th day in Cambodia as our entry date for Vietnam. As is not atypical when passing through immigration, officials use ink date stamps for noting entry and exit dates in passports. What is likely for ease of operation when dealing with 30-day visas, the exit date on their stamp is simply set to the next month, just one day earlier than the entry date stamp. That system works nicely for every month, except February. We arrived in Phnom Penh on February 3rd and were stamped with an exit date of March 2nd, that is only 29 days – thirty days is March 3rd, the date on which our Vietnam visa became valid … crap! We did debate the merits of going somewhere else ahead of Vietnam. We had a 90-day visa for that country yet had no intention of staying for that length of time, which gave us some flexibility on our entry date and we could have easily popped over to some other country (like Thailand) for a few weeks before entering Vietnam. Unfortunately, when you apply for a Vietnam e-visa you must stipulate on your application which border crossing you will be using, so unless we wanted to pay for a new set of visas we were stuck entering Vietnam through the Ha Tien crossing on (or after) March 3rd. So that’s what we did, consequences be damned. One small blessing, at least 2024 is a leap year otherwise we would have been two days in violation! We did try to plead our case by pulling up the Cambodia government website on our phones – the border patrol agent didn’t care even a little bit, he simply pointed to the stamp in our passports and kept repeating “one day over.” Besides being shunted off to the side where we had to sit in a timeout while they processed our payment (and watch all sorts of other people merrily make their way through immigration), it wasn’t a terrible ordeal. The Prek Chek/Ha Tien border is a land crossing that had us walking about half a kilometre through no man’s land to get to the Vietnam border after leaving Cambodia. Passing through Vietnamese immigration was uneventful, just slow as apparently locals can force their way to the front of the line, hand over an ID card (wrapped in a bit of cash) and they will be waived into the country!
From what we could see there aren’t a lot of reasons to be in Ha Tien, other than as a gateway to Vietnam’s coastal territories, and we only spent a single night before catching the ferry to Phú Quốc.
Phú Quốc (Foo Ku-op) is the largest island in Vietnam and sits in the Gulf of Thailand. Bits of archival material from the early 15th century seem to indicate Koh Tral belonged to the Khmers, though they put zero effort into establishing a presence there. In 1939, the French drew an arbitrary maritime line that put the island under Cochinchina (Vietnam) jurisdiction, and in 1954 ownership of Phú Quốc was upheld by the Geneva Accords. Cambodia quietly disagreed with that decision. Certainly, if you look at a map it is significantly closer to mainland Cambodia than Vietnam – we could see it when we visited Bokhor Hill Station. In 1967, Cambodia gave voice to its claim on this piece of land, which was ignored. In 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers invaded, setting the stage for several years of incursions and counter-incursions between the two countries, with Cambodia never successfully holding the advantage. Although many Cambodians still feel very strongly that Koh Tral rightfully belongs to them, in 1999 their government formally affirmed Vietnamese sovereignty over the island.
For us, this little piece of paradise served as a sun, sand, and scuba vacation – I know, like we need a vacation!
We stayed in a sweet boutique hotel featuring individual bungalows surrounding a small pool. The bungalows only had a bed and a bathroom, but there was a free washing machine (which we appreciate as full-time travellers) plus a well-stocked communal kitchen if you felt the need to cook while on holiday. At just under $29 CAD/night it was a very affordable tropical getaway. A few roosters would let us know the sun had risen each morning, birds twittered in the trees, and on the days we didn’t wander the ten minutes down to the beach, instead lounging by the pool, our hostess would treat us to plates of fresh mango. It was heavenly.
We had our choice of restaurants, all within easy walking distance.
If we weren’t up to walking in the heat however, which I must say wasn’t unbearable with the sea breeze, there is a free bus service (#17) operating between the airport and Grand World – a massive commercial complex that opened in 2021 and is struggling with viability. The #17 bus route runs right along the main street of Dương Đông, the biggest tourist town on the island and where we were staying; it was a lovely air-conditioned option to get to/from restaurants on the strip. We took it from a stop near our hotel down to the night market (a distance of about 3km / 2.8 miles) where we had dinner one evening and walked around the harbour.
One of the reasons we picked Phú Quốc was for the diving which had been touted as the best in Vietnam. It was meh – I think we’ve been spoiled by some spectacular dives in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Egypt. The water was wonderfully warm, but visibility was quite poor, maybe 10ft, and on several occasions we lost sight of our divemaster and had to follow the fins of the other couple with us, hoping they still had eyes on him!
Despite being tropical water, colourful fish were pretty much nonexistent though we did spot several seahorses which was a real treat having never spotted one of those in the wild before. They are odd little creatures, barely moving along the seabed. In fact, they are the slowest fish in the world, traveling at a maximum speed of 1.5 meters (1.6 yards) per hour – snails move twice as fast! Some interesting coral and seagrasses rounded out our underwater experience.
The island is, without question, catering to the tourist market, the Russian market in particular. Restaurants and hotels often supplied information in Vietnamese, English, and Russian, and certainly to our untrained ears that was the language we heard most often as we walked the beach and city sidewalks.
From Phú Quốc we were heading east through southern Vietnam. Most of the flights off the island go through Ho Chi Minh and because we’d been there before we opted to only spend a couple of nights in Vietnam’s most populous city – 9.3 million as of 2023. The city was formerly, and is still commonly, known as Saigon (the airport code is still SGN), a name which seems to date from the late 17th century and French colonization. In 1945, Ho Chi Minh was adopted to honour the leader of Vietnam’s independence movement. The city has a much more “Western” feel to it than the capital, Hanoi, and is definitely worthy of a multi-day visit.
Off to Da Lat and cooler temperatures in the hills of southern Vietnam!
