Visa issues

Vietnam has noticed that tourism is down a little from last year, so they have started to make it a little easier for tourists to get a visa to come into the country and to make the length of the visa a little longer.  They are trying to get it closer in line with other countries around them.

That doesn't mean we haven't had some issues.  When we originally applied for our visa in August, the policy was that visas like ours could only be for three months.  The process to get it was seamless (although  a little scary since we had to send our passports to the Vietnamese embassy in Washington, DC) and it arrived back to us with this inside:

While that was all well and good, it meant that we needed to get another visa to cover the last month and a half of our stay here. Originally we thought we were going to have to leave the country and return -- maybe a side trip to Singapore or Thailand before returning. It is common for visas to expire after three months so people have to go on a quick jaunt out of the country and then return.

But since we've been here, visa policies in Vietnam are changing. We've heard you can get a 12 month visa now, and that you didn't necessarily have to leave the country.  That sounded good to us -- there were a lot of things we still wanted to see in Vietnam and weren't too eager to leave the country just to get the visa extended.  So we went to Libby's university and their international relations office, and asked if they could get us a visa extension that would allow us to stay in the country without having to leave.  After waiting several weeks, we finally got our passports back with this in it:

That would all be good (it is valid until January) if we weren't leaving Vietnam for a trip before moving back to America.  Unfortunately, in the time that we were waiting for our visas, we couldn't remember what our visa would allow us to do and we planned a trip to Thailand for December.  We even purchased the plane ticket for Thailand, and of course the visa that we had requested wasn't the right one.  So the one above was not going to allow us to return to Vietnam if we left the country.  Back to the drawing board.

The university suggested we go to the travel agent that sold us the plane tickets to Thailand...maybe they could help us with the visa?  We actually had purchased the tickets ourselves without a travel agent (very novel in Vietnam), so that wouldn't work.  But rather than take a forty-minute bus trip to the immigration office and fight with them about our visas, I decided to contact a local travel agent here by our apartment in Cau Giay and see if they could help.  After exchanging a couple of emails with my new friend Phuong (below) we were able to get things straightened out and we now have permission to leave and return.  The letter has the red stamp of approval and everything.

I think we're good to go...