Vietnam e-Visa
Dear A,
You can be excited for us … we've just applied for our Vietnam entry visas!
And we've begun asking friends in Vietnam (foreigners and Viet people) if we can do them any favors. Some of my former students are teachers now, and we hope to add value to their classrooms by sometimes visiting and presenting an English lesson. Similar value-add for our friends who are employed at the foreigner-friendly resorts, etc.
My birthday camping is next month at McKay Crossing. Wish you could join us--we still have extra campsites on the river.
I think that's about it for now. The rest of this email is boring stuff, e-visa details written to other friends who may be coming over to visit--wish you could join us there, too!!
~Tim
Things you need to know when you’re applying for a visa to enter Vietnam:
1) There are heaps of scam websites
The only real website to use is https://evisa.gov.vn and all the others are rubbish. It’s easy to be taken in ... the real website isn’t always among the top hits in an online search.
2) Tourist Visas
As tourists we can enter the country for 3 months on a single $25 visa, or if we’re going to want to leave and come back in during that time we pay $50 for the same 3 month multi-entry visa.
We’re planning to enter in September and then have to leave the country in early December on a “visa run” and come back, and then we’ll go out again in early February for our second visa run. Probably we’ll try to get a China visa as part of the December visa run, and use it to visit friends in China in the February run. Where to go in December, though? —that’s a question we don’t yet know the answer to.
3) You’ll need to have a rectangular headshot (4x6) and a photo of your passport
Passport pics are usually 2” square, headshots on a flat white background. But now Vietnam is (and also China, incidentally) requesting 4x6 rectangles that show your neck and the top of your shoulders, too. And no smiling—flat expressions, please. (I’ve chosen not to attach the resulting headshots into this blogpost, because they’re really unflattering. Not quite mugshots, but definitely not the cheerful friends we want to be perceived as…)
4) You’ll need to indicate a specific address of where you’ll be staying
I don’t understand why they even ask this, since it’s not going to be accurate for any tourist traveling to more than one city in Vietnam, and it freaked me out the first time I was confronted with the question. I’m terribly sincere, and I don’t want to specify—on an official form—the name of a hotel I know I’m just going to start at but not remain at … but that’s what you do. So the address I use for our visas is the Thi Tai Hotel at 16 Nguyễn Cao Luyện, An Hải Bắc, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng. It's super cute and they provide breakfast--we hope to stay there several days while securing our 7-month lodgings this September.