Vietnam is the land of visa confusion right now

Back in 1986 there was this little band called Genesis that soon would become a Phil Collins solo project. There were a lot of stars in that band outside of Phil including Peter Gabriel that would go on to do their own thing and in many ways I felt he was better than Phil. Anyway, the video was pretty groundbreaking and a little horrifying to a lot of people and we'll get to that later.

At the moment, the situation in Vietnam isn't dreadful although we are locked down but the problem that most people are facing, like me, is that one day we are being told we have to get out, the next being told that we don't have to. Every agent or government official you talk to seems to have a different opinion about this and it doesn't really help that we have no clear way of finding out anything since the Immigration offices are closed in Da Nang as well as other parts of the country.

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_{This is what I think of my visa agent at the moment}

Being a visa agent in Vietnam used to be a big business and to a certain degree it still is. However, depending on who you talk to you will get a totally different answer about what the current visa regulations are. A week ago, we were told that we were all getting kicked out if we were here on a tourist visa and for some reason the process was being expedited for anyone that arrived before March 1st. I arrived 6 days before that.

Some people are getting XC exit visas and other people are not receiving them. Some people are able to extend their visas for a fee, others are able to do this for free, and others are not having visas extended at all in what seems to be a completely arbitrary decision making process. In the meantime, all of us that live here are staring down the barrel of not having a plan to exit because there is nowhere for us to go.

This is particularly true for the Australian population which is about 30% of the people I know here. They CAN'T get back into their country no matter how much they are willing to pay for it because of limits on the number of people that are being let back into Australia each day. There is one guy I know that is quite wealthy and he has been told by airlines that the soonest he can get back "home", and he doesn't even want to go, is in October. He is also being told by his visa agent that he has to leave Vietnam. So what is he supposed to do? Live in the airport terminal?

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Lately, the latest strategy of most people is to buy a fake international ticket (or a real one) then get another 30 days and hope something changes in the next 30 days. To make matters worse, the government officials seem to be playing immigration ping-pong on how it is that they want to handle this. I was fwd this FB post by a friend yesterday.

I got excited when I saw this so I sent a message to my visa agent and they had not heard anything about this. So then I contacted another visa agent that said "yes, this is true." Hooray, we can stay said the masses! But the problem is depending on who you talk to this is true or not true. Vietnam Immigration will not answer the phone at all and at this point I feel as though we are just depending on our agents to do what they can to get us something.

The ongoing issue of there not being very many flights going really anywhere from here at the moment is something that is a big problem for people who do have the resources to get out of here. It is even worse for people like me who have a dog because it seems that every country has different rules about whether or not dogs can even be transported through their airport at all. The travel agents and the airlines / airports themselves are also not very helpful or give conflicting information about all of this as well.

There's that somewhat creepy video from 1986 in case you want to see it.

There is nobody here that feels secure with their visas right now and everyone is confused including the people that we pay specifically to NOT be confused. I've reached the point where I am about to just give up. I want to leave but I can't. So what do you do in that situation?

For me If Immigration wants me to provide an outgoing flight to get an extension I will book a flight, print out the ticket, then cancel the flight and get a refund. That is NOT the way that I want to handle this, but I don't seem to have any other choice at the moment.