Mekong River Tour: Up Until The Vietnam Border (Stealing From Facebook)

(Travelogue--Cambodia)

Another Facebook album link.  (This is part of the project I explained about in this post HERE.)  The album is: Mekong River Tour (up until I got kicked off the boat) 
As the title of that album indicates, this trip was a disaster.  It was my first attempt to do the Tour of the Mekong Delta by catching the boat from Phnom Penh.  

Vietnam is one of those countries that require that you get a visa in advance before you enter.  So when I bought the ticket from a travel agent in Phnom Penh, they helped me apply for a visa at the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh.

I got the visa no problem, but once we started the tour and were going down the Mekong River in the boat, the tour guide noticed a problem.  The Vietnamese government, he said, would demand 4 clean pages in my passport before they would let me in.  At this point, my passport was filling up, and I had less than 4 pages.

Sure enough, it resulted in me being refused entry once we got to the Cambodia/Vietnam border.  The tour guide suggested a bribe might get me through.  The Cambodian side of the border accepted the bribe, but the Vietnamese side did not.  And so I was let of the tour boat, and had to get a taxi back to Phnom Penh.

As I wrote at the time: 

I learned a valuable (if slightly expensive) lesson today out how passports and international borders operate.  It turns out it is not enough to just get just have the visa for a country in your passport.  You also need space in your passport for them to stamp it.  And they refuse to stamp on their own visa, they want a clean page.  And you can't use the last 4 pages of your passport for some reason.  And it's no good pointing out to them they can make a stamp on half a page, they want a full 2 clean pages (in addition to the one page already being taken up by their visa) before they let you in the country.

All this was news to me, and led to a differing of interpretations between me and the border patrol over when my passport was full.  But their view won out in the end.

Visa to Vietnam: $56

Pre-paid nonrefundable tour of the Mekong Delta: $60

Bribes paid to Cambodian border officials: $20

Taxi back to Phnom Penh (after being denied entry to Vietnam): $45

Being reprimanded for having a full passport in front of the entire boat tour and then kicked off the boat--Priceless

Therefore, all the pictures in this album are only of the Mekong River ride from Phnom Penh up until the Vietnamese border.