Travel day on the Mekong

We started very early this nothing on the Hau River, a tributary of the Mekong at Chau Doc, our port town to board our speedboat to Cambodia.

The day starts early do that you can get through the immigration process on the river at the Vietnam Cambodian border. Before our stop at the Vietnam border, our passports were collected by the agent. plus our Vietnam paper visa and $37 USD. At the border we exited the boat while immigration processed us out of Vietnam.

When everyone’s paperwork was in order, we reboarded our boat for the 5-10 minutes trip to the Cambodian border . Our passport had remained with our agent on land, taken physically to the next station where the officials began processing them.

We disembarked while that process was going on, about an hour or so. Each of us received our “Vietnam outbound” processed passports and presented them personally to an agent. were photographed, along with our passport and visits. That agent then took the passport, stamped it a few more times and the visa sticker was pasted in, plus an in immigration card stuck in which we turn on exciting the country. It was a cumbersome (on purpose) process…. probably to justify the cost! when we received our finally processed passport back, they were reviewed one more time by another agent before we reboarded for another 4 hours on the river to Phnom Penh.

A Few sights along the way, the river widened but still much like the Vietnam section, with rice barges being loaded. small fishing villages along the share and small boats fishing. At last, Phnom Penh