Getting a Cambodian Tourist Visa and Extending it (in Siem Reap)

Passport holders of ASEAN countries can enter Cambodia visa-free for 14 to 30 days, depending on the country. For some primarily Middle-Eastern and African countries, a visa on arrival in Cambodia is not available and you need to apply for a visa at a Cambodian embassy prior to travelling. For everyone else (including UK passport holders), you can enter Cambodia on a tourist visa on arrival.

How long is a Cambodian tourist visa?

You might have read that a Cambodian tourist visa lasts for 30 days. Everyone I've ever spoken to says a Cambodian tourist visa is 30 days. If you look online, including on any government websites, they say a Cambodian tourist visa is 30 days.

A Cambodian tourist visa is not 30 days.

What I learned the hard way is that when you enter Cambodia, the border official will give you a visa until the same day of the next month, minus one day. For example if you enter Cambodia on December 15th, your visa will be until one month later minus one day, so January 14th. That means that your visa will be either 30 or 31 days depending on the length of the month in which you enter the country.

Except if you come in February. I came in February.

Mistakenly believing that my visa would be for 30 days, prior to arriving I had a flight booked out of the country 30 days after my day of arrival, and I had non-refundable accommodation booked until 30 days after my day of arrival. So when the border agent gave me a visa for 28 days, I didn't have a good time.

I was entering the country by bus and the bus company took care of everyone's visas and didn't give us back our passports until we were back on the bus and driving away from the border, so I didn't get the opportunity to query this discrepancy with the border agent. I asked online though, and it turns-out this wasn't a one-off. Whether this is how the length of all visas is determined, or whether some actually are 30 days no matter which month you enter, I'm not sure, but I did find several other people online who had also entered in February and had only been given a visa for 28 days.

I'd been in Cambodia a couple of months prior to this, arriving in December. I hadn't paid much attention to my visa at this time, but when I looked back and counted, arriving in December, a 31 day month, I had been given a 31 day visa.

This is only really relevant to people arriving in February, but if you are, don't make the same mistake I made and make arrangements on the assumption you'll be allowed to stay in the country for 30 days. You may well only be permitted to stay for 28.

How to get a Cambodian tourist visa

Assuming that you can't be arsed to go to a Cambodian embassy, you can get a Cambodian tourist visa in two ways. Either an eVisa that you apply for online, or a visa on arrival. As I've only ever done the visa on arrival, I won't say anything more about the eVisa.

Note that the visa on arrival is available at all likely entry points for a tourist, but if you're coming into the country somewhere weird, check that it's available where you're crossing the border, otherwise you might find you're unable to enter.

The visa costs $30 and at places such as Phnom Penh airport where they get plane-loads of tourists arriving at once, the process is very streamlined and only takes a couple of minutes.

You hand-over your passport and $30, wait for a couple of minutes while they fill-in the particulars, then they'll call your name and give your passport back to you. That's all there really is to it.

The process can be a little slower at land borders.

Bribing the border officials

While they've done a pretty good job of eradicating corruption at airports, at land borders that's not quite so true. What I mean by this, is the immigration official will ask for an extra "fee" to process your visa for you. Usually it'll just be one or two dollars, so it's worth having some small change when getting to the border, beyond the $30 visa fee.

Bribes are a little hard to stomach for some westerners who're new to the region, and you may be tempted to make a stand and refuse to pay. As the saying goes, “the graveyard is full of cyclists who had the right of way.” There are times to be principled and times to not. In my opinion, this is a time to not.

While if you point-blank refuse to pay any bribe, you probably will still get into the country, you can expect to get delayed at immigration for the privilege.

If you're crossing a land border on a bus, the bus company will typically handle the visa process for you. They'll take a fee for doing this, and any bribe will be baked-into that fee. For example, when I crossed back into Cambodia from Vietnam, the bus company took $40 for this $30 visa. I assume that the extra $10 gets split between the bus company and the immigration official. On these trips you might see one or two people who refuse to pay and insist on getting the visa themselves for $30. I don't recommend doing this. The bus company staff do this every day. That means they know the immigration officials and get to skip the line. If the immigration official is taking a $5 kick-back for each passenger, they're going to be pretty eager too, so doing the visa process yourself, you're likely to take a lot longer, and the bus won't wait for you.

On my trip there was one guy who insisted on doing the visa himself, and while he did make it, it took him a lot of time and stress walking back and forth between Cambodia and Vietnam, while the rest of us got through without having to do much at all and then we went and had lunch.

The $10 extra was worth it.

Do you need to get a visa extension?

So you've come into Cambodia in February, you've booked non-refundable accommodation and a flight out of the country for 30 days later on the mistaken assumption that being able to count to thirty is a requirement to get a job as a Cambodian border official, and now you're only allowed to stay in the country for 28 days. What then?

The way I looked at it was I had four options:

1. I rearrange my travel plans to leave after 28 days instead of 30
2. I leave the country and re-enter on a new visa
3. I overstay by two days
4. I get an extension to my tourist visa

I quickly decided against rearranging my travel plans. I had a non-refundable flight out of Cambodia already booked at a cost of about £80, and a non-refundable Airbnb for 30 days at about £20 per night. To shorten my stay by two days, I'd need to rebook this flight and rebook the last two nights accommodation in another country, so it'd cost me about £120 and mess with the travel plans I had after Cambodia, so fuck that.

I also decided against leaving and re-entering the country. The time and cost of travelling across the border and back, including the cost of a new visa (and the cost of the visa to enter this second country if going to Vietnam or Laos), potentially with an overnight stay just wasn't worth it.

Realistically my choices were to overstay my visa by two days, or to extend my current visa.

Of all the advice I sought, including from an agent who I'd pay to get a visa extension, everyone told me to just overstay for two days. The fine for an overstay is $10 per day, so overstaying by two days would cost $20 if anyone cared at all. The feeling I got was very much that if you overstay by less than 30 days, then no one really cares. It's overstaying by more than 30 days where you'll have problems.

Apart from my rigidity in mostly obeying the law, I didn't like the idea of overstaying for a couple of reasons.

The first was that although everyone said that immigration almost certainly wouldn't care if I overstayed by less than 30 days, no one could tell me definitively that they wouldn't care. I could get an immigration official with a stick up his arse that day who decides he's going to ban me from re-entering Cambodia for a set period of time, and that would be problematic.

Given how much time I spend in Thailand, having a country with which it shares a land border that I can quickly pop over to when my Thai visa expires is quite important.

Myanmar isn't really viable given the current situation there, and I wouldn't go to Malaysia, because fuck Malaysia, which leaves me with just Laos and Cambodia. Cambodia has the better Internet speeds of the two, which is important to me as a remote software engineer, so is my preferred choice. If I suddenly lost the ability to jump across the border to Cambodia, that would be an inconvenience.

The other reason was that I was flying from Cambodia to Thailand with the intent of getting a Thai visa waiver. A requirement for getting a Thai visa waiver is that you've booked travel out of Thailand.

I hadn't.

This can be problematic in two places. If you get denied entry to a country, the airline that brought you there gets fined, which is why airlines can be very finicky about letting you board the plane if you don't meet all visa requirements. This is the most likely pain point, but you can also technically be denied entry at Thai immigration.

That's pretty unlikely. I've had Thai immigration officials ask me if I've got outbound travel booked before, and I said "no." She then asked me how long I was planning on staying. "Dunno, however long you let me" I replied. She just smiled and stamped me into the country anyway. As long as you're not a dick, they don't really care. I've entered Thailand many, many times and never had outbound travel booked, and it's never been a problem. And I've always been able to point to the fact that I've never overstayed in a country before.

That's a very hard sell if I'm trying to board a flight having just overstayed in Cambodia, so I envisioned unlikely but possible problems when boarding my flight if I overstayed, so I opted for option 4: Getting a visa extension.

How to extend a Cambodian tourist visa (in Siem Reap)

Once I'd decided on extending my Cambodian tourist visa, I had to figure-out how. And it turns out that the only place you can do this is Phnom Penh. I was in Siem Reap. Great.

Luckily you don't have to do it yourself; an agent can do it for you. For a fee. I asked around town how much this should cost, and everyone said an agency would charge $60, so when the first agency I went into only asked for $50, I was sold.

This agency was Vann Savath in the centre of Siem Reap, a short walk from Pub Street. It's basically just one woman sitting behind a desk, but she knows her shit. I had to give her my passport, $50, and a passport-sized photo.

I also handed her my phone and my phone number. She did something on an app on her phone, a verification code got sent to mine, she did something with it. Not too sure what was going on there, but it all worked. I left her my passport, and she said she'd call me when it was ready.

It's worth noting that the extension process takes 7 working days. I handed in my passport on a Wednesday, and I didn't get it back until the Saturday 10 days later, so if you need your passport for travel or any other reason, be mindful of this.

If you're doing an extension at the end of your first visa and you don't want to overstay, the date that matters to immigration is the date that your passport arrives at the immigration office in Phnom Penh. The date that the extension is processed is irrelevant.

For example if your first visa expires on December 15th and your passport arrives at the immigration office in Phnom Penh on or before December 15th, then even if your extension isn't processed until December 20th, you haven't broken any rules. If your passport arrives on December 16th or afterwards, then it will be considered an overstay, which may affect your eligibility for an extension (not sure how strict this is).

That's pretty much all there is to it. The agent handles everything for you. Like all immigration procedures, it's rather a pointless process, but this is the game you play for a life of travel.

Vann Savath

Was it the right decision to get a visa extension?

Who can say for sure? Financially, no. The cost of overstaying for two days would have been $20, but I paid $50 for the extension, so I paid an extra $30 just to stay within the rules.

I was slightly dubious about leaving my passport with an agent who was then responsible for transporting it to Phnom Penh and back. My biggest fear was that it'd get lost in transit, but there were no issues, so in that sense it was a good decision.

Would I have encountered issues either boarding my flight to Thailand, or getting potentially banned from re-entering Cambodia if I hadn't done the extension?

I think almost certainly not, but who knows? For me the extra $30 was worth it to mitigate the 1% chance of either of these happening.

In terms of going through immigration when leaving Cambodia, if anything the visa extension raised suspicion because the officials couldn't understand why I'd got an extension only to stay for two more days.

I've been travelling for half my life and I never have any problems at immigration, except in Cambodia. For some reason Cambodian border officials just don't like me. Given the shit I had to go through because they can't count to thirty, I'm not really a fan of theirs either.

On top of this, my name had been added to my visa as 'Jethro Citizen'. They'd copied my first name, but rather than writing my second name, instead copied from the next line which said 'British Citizen', so according to Cambodia, my name is now 'Jethro Citizen'.

I quite like it.

Worse still was that when trying to leave the country, they couldn't actually understand their own visas. I'd been in Cambodia in December, left to Vietnam for a month, then come back in February and got this extension. That meant there were three different documents in my passport, and they really had trouble reading the dates on them.

I had two officials interrogating me, and they kept asking me why I'd been in Cambodia since December.

"I haven't," I kept on telling them. "I left in January and came back a month ago."

They couldn't get it. Eventually I got through, but not before they did a lot of typing on their computer while looking at me disparagingly, so my intent of getting a visa extension in order to mitigate any black marks on my name might have been in vain. This visa extension seemed to cause more problems than it solved when leaving Cambodia, so it was probably a waste of $30. If you ever find yourself in the same situation, I think I'd advise to just overstay for two days.