Blogs, guidebooks and locals had all said the same thing: extending a Vietnamese tourist visa yourself was more hassle than it was worth. Best to fork out an extra $15 and have a travel agent do the legwork.
“Trust me mate,” a British expat said with a shrug, “you do not want to have to deal with the civil service.”
“Rubbish!” I thought, chuckling at the naiveté of tourists with more money than sense. I had successfully negotiated immigration offices in Damascus, Lusaka and Jakarta. I had convinced a land border official in Nicaragua to Google ‘Malta’ and see that it was, as I claimed, part of the EU. How hard could it be to extend a visa in Saigon?
Armed with an address and a sunny morning’s share of optimism, I set out. The tranquil, well-kept office block seemed promising enough, and the blue sign hanging outside its side door was positively encouraging. ‘Foreign passports – visas’ its English translation read.
Why, then, was every single person sitting in the waiting hall clutching identical green passports purporting to belong to the ‘Socialist Republic of Vietnam’?
“No here,” I was told when my turn finally came. The uniformed official scribbled another address onto a piece of paper and passed it beneath the Perspex. “This, go here. Visa office.”A hurdle, but not an insurmountable one. The address I had been handed was only a short drive away, and it was still 10.30am. Besides, the first office had been well-run, if a little slow. If it all went according to plan, I’d be sipping a beer by mid-afternoon.
If they wanted a game of bureaucratic poker, they would get it
The second address turned out to be a set of offices, each with a number and designation – in Vietnamese. Some passport waving later, I was shooed towards office number four.
Imagine a world in which Franz Kafka was drafted into the Vietnamese civil service as an organisational consultant. Think of the system he might design, add a healthy dollop of Oriental-Western incomprehension, and you’ll understand what office number four of Saigon’s immigration department felt like.
People queued up in lines that criss-crossed one another. Different desks had different seating areas for people to wait in, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to their layout. Officials not on desk duty rushed to and fro, clutching papers and barking orders to their underlings.
Each section was neatly signposted in big, bold, Vietnamese lettering. Squinting and mouthing the words didn’t help – I had no idea what they meant, and there wasn’t an English speaker in the room.
Saying “visa” didn’t seem to register anything, so I tried “passport”. This was more successful. “Passport!” an elderly man exclaimed. “Passport number one!”
“Yes,” I thought to myself, “passports are great. They are indeed ‘number one’. But right now I wish you’d tell me where to go, old man.”
He waved and gesticulated wildly – “number one! Passport number one!” – until it dawned on me that my impatience might have been misplaced. This man, I realised, was telling me where to queue.
Eyeing the LED board with flashing numbers, I headed to the ticket dispensary in the corner of the room. But this was not the bog-standard, ticker-tape affair found at most supermarket deli stops. This was the ticket dispenser from hell.
Three buttons – red, green and blue – offered themselves tantalisingly on the dispenser touchscreen. Sometimes, pressing the buttons did nothing. But try a second later, and itwould spit out a numbered ticket, with each coloured button leading to a differently numbered ticket. Which one did I need?
Back in my seat and with one eye on the LED screen, I held my trio of tickets: Red 46, green 132 and a blue 592. If they wanted a game of bureaucratic poker, they would get it.
The LED numbers flashed by, but nobody seemed to give a damn. People walked up to a booth whenever one became available, shuffling past me, sat there glued to my seat.
“Come,” an official beckoned me. It was now almost 1.30 pm, and thoughts of an afternoon beer were replaced with a grumbling belly.
“I’d like to extend my Vietnam tourist visa, please.”
“You must have form.”
Thoughts of being sent on a wild- goose chase for an application form began swimming around my head. What did this form look like? Could I get one from this office?
“Here,” the official said as she slid a paper towards me. “This section, about you. This section, about where you stay. Where you stay?”
“With a friend,” I replied.
“So must get friend details and friend signature,” she said as she pointed to the bottom of the form. “Must also get signature of chief of police of district where you live,”she added, almost as an afterthought.
That last sentence stopped me cold. “What?”
“Must go to police, get signature, then come back. Visa extension will take seven day to finish.”
Seven hours and one failed visit to my local police station later, I found myself shuffling into a bright shop in the Saigon’s Pham Ngu Lao tourist district.
“Hello sir, welcome to TNK Travel. How may I help you?”
I grimaced. “Ahem. Do you offer visa extension services?”