I spent over an hour today working on getting our visitor visa to enter Vietnam. That does include numerous attempts to call the consulate to find out the visa fee, since one portion of the website stated I had to get a money order or cashier's check. Jeremy had emailed them numerous times inquiring about the fee. His emails were never answered. I called numerous times this morning, and my call was answered by an automated response system, but I never was able to reach anyone live to pose a question. I called the after-hours number, and I received a recording from some unfortunate woman who let callers know that the consulate has an error on their website, accidently posting her personal phone number. She added that the consulate had promised to change the website in July. I'll bet she's thanking the technology gurus for inventing caller ID.
Surprisingly, if you search for Vietnam visa online, you'll come up with all sorts of agencies that will gladly collect a handsome service fee to process your visa for you. I thought that was crazy. Who wants to hand over extra cash and their passports to some third party? When I previously backpacked through Southeast Asia, we would often stop short of a border, and our truck driver would stop and force us to pay an extra processing fee so he could stand in line with our applications and passports. We still had to hang around at the border waiting for all of our visas to get processed, mind you. And, we had to give up security of our passports. Some of us, armed with our Lonely Planet guides full of border entry information and trained to never let our passports out of sight, questioned the premium we were being asked to pay, saving ourselves a little cash while gladly standing in line ourselves, avoiding the tourist-trap shops at the border that catered to waiting foreigners. Reading about these visa services reminded me of those dusty border experiences.
With passports, applications, check book, and passport photos in hand, I climbed the hills of San Francisco to get to the consulate. I had to sign in just to wait, and the sign-in woman was not particularly friendly as she attempted to bringn order to the chaotic crowd of people. I was surrounded by regulars holding dozens of passports. Being entrepreneurially minded, I started calculating... $45 per passport times 20 passports...not a bad business, given it's scalable.
I was elated when my name was called. That meant that I could move from the waiting to wait area to the waiting area. And, since I had but two passports to process, my transaction was relatively quick, once I made it to the front of the waiting area. And, in two days, I have the pleasure of waiting to wait, then waiting again to pick up our passports with visas enclosed.
As I emerged from the building and checked the time, I couldn't help but to wonder if those visa agency services are on to something. What's a little identity theft risk anyway?
