Travelling from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City
When I was planning my trip from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), I had to pull together information from a lot of different sources to find everything that I wanted to know. That was a massive pain, so I'm putting it all together here to save you the trouble. You're welcome.
This article is split into three sections:
Getting a Vietnam visa
At the time of writing, visa-free travel to Vietnam is available to 22 countries, notably including the UK, but not the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand (lol). The number of days entry permitted on a visa exemption varies by country, but for most is 15 days.
By applying for a tourist visa, you'll be permitted to stay in Vietnam for 30 days, so unless you know that you're going to need less than 15, I'd recommend applying for a tourist visa.
Also worth noting that for my trip from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh, there was one person on the bus trying to enter Vietnam on a visa exemption. Although he got in eventually, he was held to the back of the line and the border agent looked very apprehensive about letting him in at all, so attempt visa-free travel at your peril.
For most travellers entering as a tourist, you're going to want to arrange a tourist visa in advance. While this can also be done with a travel agent, you can apply online and it's a fairly straight forward process, but note that it takes 3 working days. I applied on a Friday, and it wasn't until the following Wednesday that I had my visa, so don't leave it until the last minute.
To apply, visit the online portal. From here you're going to click through a couple of pages until you get to the application form.
For me, by far the hardest part of this form was setting up my phone to take an acceptable photograph. As all recent passport photos I had were with long hair, but I'd since cut it all off, I needed a new picture so had to put my phone on a book, which was on two pillows, which were on a chair that was on a table, just to get my phone to the right height. Then after the five hundredth attempt, where I finally wasn't pulling a stupid face, I had an acceptable photograph. You will also need a clear photograph of the details page of your passport.
The rest of the form is fairly self-explanatory with the exception that you must select the correct entry checkpoint. It's really not clear which you should select and for this I found that Google wasn't much help. I ended up just looking at the most obvious road between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh on Google Maps, and picking the entry point off there.
On the assumption that you're taking a bus from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City, then you want to select Moc Bai Landport. Your selection here is the only entry point through which you'll be allowed to enter Vietnam, so it is imperetive that you choose correctly.
You must also select your exit checkpoint. This doesn't appear on the final visa that you're issued, and I'd be very surprised if they prevent people from leaving the country because they selected the wrong exit checkpoint (I might be wrong), so if you don't know your exit port at the time of application, just select the most likely one.
Once you submit the form and pay your $25 fee, you'll receive an email including your registration code. With this code you can go onto the E-visa page to check your application status, but until the visa is issued, it doesn't give much information other that your application is pending.
After what should be no more than three working days, you'll receive another email titled 'E - visa Vietnam: Announcement result'. This email will simply prompt you to go to the same E-visa page as above and to enter your registration code to login, although now your application status should be listed as 'Granted visa', and there will be a link to print your visa.
You need a paper copy of this visa for when you get to the border, so make sure to print it off. As I'll detail below, you'll be able to do so when buying a bus ticket.
Travelling to Ho Chi Minh City
Although there are other options such as direct flights, I'm only going to detail travelling to Ho Chi Minh City by bus. It's more economically and environmentally responsible, and when you consider the time needed at either end waiting around at, and getting to/from the airports for an international flight, there's little advantage of flying.
There are multiple bus companies offering services from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh, but if you spend any time on Google researching, you'll soon find that Giant Ibis is continually recommended as the best one.
What I couldn't decide, was whether this was very smart marketing from them with some articles strategically well-placed in the Google rankings, whether one person wrote an article recommending them and everyone else just copied it, or whether they are just that much better than the competition. Having now travelled with them, I can conclusively say that it's not the latter.
Were they bad? I've had worse, but it was hardly the luxury travel that all these articles promised.
Firstly to buy a ticket, you can buy online at giantibis.com. Their site is absolute garbage on mobile, so if you are going to book online, make sure to do it on a computer. Personally though, I still prefer to buy tickets in person because it gives you the opportunity to ask any questions about travel time, the border crossing, the number of stops etc., that you can't get online. I'll do my best to answer all those questions here, but even just for printing-off your Vietnam visa and having the agent check that all the details are correct, it's worth going into the ticket office.
It gets a little confusing because the place where you buy the ticket is no longer where you catch the bus. The Giant Ibis ticket office in Phnom Penh is located here. A ticket from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City is $39, and you can pay by card. The staff speak good English and are very helpful in answering any questions you have. Be mindful that there are a lot of surrounding businesses offering bus tickets, so be sure to go into the one for Giant Ibis.
The Giant Ibis ticket office in Phnom Penh.
The place that you catch the bus is here. It's a little out of the way, but a tuk-tuk can get you there pretty quickly. There isn't much going on once you've crossed the river, so you shouldn't expect to any traffic.
Before continuing, I'm going to add the following caveat that might have led me to remember this journey with more disdain than I otherwise would. You know how before you catch a flight or train or a bus, you look around the waiting room, and you spot the one person where you think to yourself "fuck, I hope I'm not sitting next to them"?
On this occasion the Gods were not with me, because it was my turn to be sacrificed.
We spoke briefly, and this was a very nice man. A lawyer in fact, travelling with his whole family in South-East Asia, so you'd assume not short of money. Yet for whatever reason, washing escaped him. You could see from across the waiting room that his jeans hadn't been cleaned in weeks, probably months. He had a very overwhelming aroma of urine, and to top it all off, he was rather rotund, to the point that in order to not touch him, and I didn't want to touch him, I had to spend the entire journey curved into the aisle in a banana pose. I spent the whole trip in considerable discomfort, and had a bad back for more than a week afterwards.
I usually look forward to long journeys like this because I can relax in my seat, listen to podcasts, read my book, maybe watch a movie. Not this time, I didn't do any of that. I spent the entire journey leaning into the aisle, trying to breathe as little as possible. I would hope that no one else has to endure that and that your trip to Ho Chi Minh City is more pleasant, but I thought it poignant to add, as it may have tainted my opinion of this journey.
I always go for aisle seats. I like to have the freedom to stretch-out a bit more, and the freedom to get up quickly and at a moment's notice. Particularly when we arrive or when we stop somewhere, I don't want to be waiting for the person in the seat next to me to be polite and let everyone else past, I just want to get out. However, with Giant Ibis I would recommend getting a window seat, for the simple reason that only the window seats have electical ports to charge your devices.
Only the window seats have charging ports next to them.
I was able to thread my charger underneath the seat so that I could charge my phone while sitting in the aisle seat, but it certainly wasn't as comfortable as being right next to the plug, so if you have any intention of using your phone to watch movies, then get the window.
I'd been told that this journey would take 6 to 7 hours. The reality was it was almost 10. For some reason, we took about an hour driving in a huge zig-zag across Phnom Penh before leaving the city. I think they were expecting to pick-up other passengers who didn't show up.
I'd assumed that the logic of moving the bus terminal to outside the city centre, was that it saves the bus driving through it. When it does it anyway, then I'm not really sure what the point is, but that's the way it is.
It's worth noting that Giant Ibis buses don't have toilets. According to the Giant Ibis website, "they take up a lot of space and smell bad." There were, I believe, only supposed to be three scheduled stops on this journey, but we had to make two more for people who couldn't hold their bladders. These delays meant that we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City much closer to rush hour, turning our 6 to 7 hour journey into an almost 10 hour one.
Don't expect much at these stops, particularly if you're looking for vegan food. If you're lucky you'll be able to get some crisps or some nuts or some fruit, but I'd be fully prepared to go the day without eating. I'm fairly certain that the bus company or bus driver gets a kick-back for stopping at the particular spots that they do, because they definitely don't choose them for the facilities.
The most important part of the journey though, is getting comfortably across the border and into Vietnam, and this is where the extra money you pay to Giant Ibis becomes worth it.
At one of these rest stops, we were joined by another bus company called Danh Danh, who also ply the route from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh. And remembering the torment that I was presently enduring, it was with great envy that I looked at this Danh Danh bus and saw that they had three seats per row instead of four, so anyone travelling alone got an armchair to themselves, with no one sitting next to them. What you don't get on a Danh Danh bus is an attendant that speaks English, which for knowing how long you're stopping somewhere, or more importantly, for what's going on at the border, is priceless.
Our English-speaking attendant handled all the visa stuff. We all got herded around like cattle, but at the end of it, everyone got stamped-out of Cambodia and stamped-into Vietnam without having to speak to a border agent or do very much at all.
The whole process took around an hour. We all got stamped out of Cambodia incredibly quickly, then got taken to a restaurant for lunch in no man's land between Cambodia and Vietnam while the attendant kept our passports. After lunch, we all got back on the bus and were driven to Vietnam immigration, where we got called forward one at a time as this one immigration official stamped everyone's passports. Once you were through, you had to put your luggage through a scanner, but I don't think anyone was even looking at it. And without having to do anything or answer any questions, we were all into Vietnam. For this part of the journey, I can't fault Giant Ibis.
Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City
There is no bus station in Ho Chi Minh, but instead there's a sort of... bus street.
Bang in the middle of district 1, there are a load of bus companies all on the same street, and buses just park outside their company's ticket office.
The Giant Ibis office is located here, so this is where the bus will be arriving.
The Giant Ibis ticket office in Ho Chi Minh City.
Once you're off the bus, there are three things that you're going to want to immediately consider.
Money
The first opportunity you'll have as part of this journey to get Vietnamese money, will likely come at the border. When we stepped-off the bus in no man's land, there were a couple of women hanging around offering to change money. Presumably they accept riel as well as dollars, so if you have any remaining Cambodian money and you're not going to go back, then despite the abysmal exchange rate that they'll inevitably offer, riel is worthless outside of Cambodia. As I knew I'd be back in Cambodia, I didn't do this so I arrived in Ho Chi Minh without any local currency.
You're going to get dropped-off right in the middle of the tourist centre of the city, and on what I term 'bus street' (Đ. Phạm Ngũ Lão), pretty much every business (including the Giant Ibis ticket office) advertises currency exchange. I would avoid these if possible, and instead favour going to an ATM, but you won't be short of choices if you do need to exchange money.
There are a load of ATMs on bus street in either direction. If you head east (turn right as you're coming out of the ticket office) then you hit the first one after about two minutes. While I did research the cheapest ATMs to use as a foreigner in Vietnam, I found them all to be noticeably cheaper than the extortionate foreigner tax you get charged at ATMs in Cambodia, so don't worry too much about fees.
SIM card
I'd used 'Smart' as my mobile network in Cambodia, and before leaving Phnom Penh had checked how much they charged for roaming. Costing just $2 per day for unlimited data in Vietnam, I figured that rather than go through the hassle of needing a SIM as soon as I crossed the border, I'd top-up my phone with a couple of dollars extra and just use my Cambodia SIM for that first day in Vietnam.
It doesn't work. Despite telling me I was connected to Vietnamese networks, I didn't get a single website to load on my Cambodia SIM, and even the bus' abysmal wifi was more reliable, so I needed a SIM as soon as I arrived.
Just as almost every business on bus street offers currency exchange, pretty much all of them sell SIM cards (again, including the Giant Ibis ticket office). They know that bus-loads of clueless tourists are being dropped-off there everyday, and are catering right to them.
As I was going to be here for a month, I wanted to make sure my SIM was setup properly, so I ignored these shops and instead went to an official Viettel store. As well as being more reliable, I figured it would be better value here than buying a SIM off someone on the street.
I was slightly apprehensive about going in here and whether any of the staff would speak English and whether they were used to foreigners coming in, but I needn't have been concerned. While I was there, two other westerners came in to buy SIM cards, all the staff spoke good English, and they were so used to foreigners coming in that the tariffs they offered had been printed-out and written in English and were on the table in front of me, so it couldn't have been easier. I got the cheapest 30 day option, which was just 170,000 VND and included 4GB/day of data, which is an insane amount.
I typically use about 0.5GB of data per month, so with 4GB/day and so cheap, I was pretty happy. My SIM worked for everyday of my 28 day stay in Ho Chi Minh without me needing to pay anymore money or do anything, and the speeds were very respectable. I did a speed test that showed 124mbps download speed on 4G when I had good reception.
Getting to your room
The safest way to ensure that you're not getting screwed on a taxi fare, is to use Grab or an equivalent app. If you want to get somewhere and you don't yet have a SIM card, the two taxi companies that come most recommended as least likely to fuck you over are Mai Linh and Vinasun, although whether you'll be able to find one as you arrive is another matter.
The Internet is littered with examples of people getting screwed-over by taxis in Vietnam, especially of the metres having 'tourist rates', where the driver flicks a switch and their trustworthy looking metre charges an exorbitant rate, so flag a taxi on the street at your own risk.
As you get off the bus, you'll be greeted by some unofficial taxis. Although the usual advice is to avoid these, if you can negotiate a fare that you're happy with and you don't get any red flags off the driver, it can also be a perfectly amicable way of getting around, so use your judgement, and don't feel pressured into taking a ride if something doesn't feel right.
I was lucky in that I was staying about a 20 minute walk from bus street, so I just walked to my room, put down my suitcase, and then went out to get money and a SIM card. If that's not viable for you, then use Grab if at all possible. Only as a last resort would I suggest taking a taxi that you hail on the street.