In my situation here in Vietnam, however, visa is not the credit card but the official document they paste onto a page in your passport that allows you to remain legally in the country. In the expat and tourist circles here in Saigon visas are a constant conversation topic against a backdrop of ever-changing rules cloaked in politics, mystery, and various degrees of indirection.
Ask anyone here about anything related to a Vietnam visa and you'll get an answer as definitive and useful as the weather report for the dark side of the moon. You can find official information regarding visas on the web, for example, but what you'll find is about as close a reflection to reality as the official currency exchange rates. Oh, please, don't make me laugh too hard!
There are some exceptions to that though and it all depends on exactly whom you deal with. Any expat who's been here long enough to have dealt with getting a new or extended visa has their connection, their trusted emissary, who assists them in the visa process. Your Vietnamese visa agent is regarded similarly to your auto mechanic or dentist or tax adviser in the USA. You have one, you like them, and you actively promote them to others.
You grow to depend on your visa agent because he or she (often she) is the one you can go to for definitive answers to your simple visa questions. Or definitive answer to your simple visa question: what do I need to do to extend my visa? Whether he or she is in command of the latest information and provides the best service at the best price becomes a minor issue as your primary concern is simply to get your visa without having to spend days of your life doing it and sleepless nights worrying about it. Ultimately the transaction is based on a large amount of trust: you hand over your passport and maybe advance payment to someone who promises to return your passport to you within some reasonable amount of time with a new valid visa. A British friend last year paid a Vietnamese woman he knew to extend his visa and she disappeared with his money and passport for a period of weeks. He eventually was able to find her and got his passport back but, needless to say, it was not a stress-free period of his life.
If you scour the Pham Ngu Lao tourist area of district 1 in Saigon you can find dozens of establishments offering visa services. If you're willing to put in the time and legwork you'll find someone who'll do it for a good price. One way to know if you're dealing with someone who knows the system is if they pick up the phone and call someone to discuss your visa after hearing what you want. Of course the conversation will be in Vietnamese so you won't really know what they're talking about, but it's a safe bet. Then the next time you're sitting around with a group of expats and the visa topic arises, as it so often does, you can offer up your experience as the most recent and reliable and thereby be crowned the visa king for the day. Just don't forget that it's only for the day.
I don't know all the parameters that go into granting a visa, but I imagine your recent (or not-so-recent) history in Vietnam and your nationality factor in, but the visa situation here really is similar to the weather. And of course different weathermen give different reports.
The maid at a mini-hotel I was staying at in the Pham Ngu Lao area offered her own cut-rate visa services when I informed her how much I had paid to get a visa. The reason she offered to do this is because any Vietnamese can perform this service and it can be quite lucrative. For each type of visa or extension, Vietnamese immigration charges a set and relatively low fee in US dollars. Relative, that is, to what you'll actually pay a Vietnamese agent to do it for you. Someone representing a foreigner to immigration can charge whatever he likes to the foreigner and pocket the difference. And it's in US dollars which is still a big plus here. As an example, in my most recent visa transaction the fee I paid to my agent equaled the immigration fee.
Something that might occur to many is to cut the Vietnamese agent out of the loop and instead go directly to Vietnamese immigration and pay only the base fee. That's an interesting idea but it would be wrong! There are at least 2 reasons why Vietnamese immigration doesn't want foreigners tramping into their offices submitting visa applications, at least inside Vietnam. The first is that they don't want to have to deal with your language barrier. I've heard stories of foreigners who learned to speak Vietnamese well enough that they could do their own visas and maybe they were treated favorably, I don't know. Which leads to the second and more important reason, which is that by using a Vietnamese agent you're providing an easy and well-paid job likely paid in foreign currency. There's nothing about that not to like.
When you're dealing with a Vietnamese visa office outside of Vietnam everything is different. I've dealt with US, Thai, and Cambodian offices and had varying experiences with each. The US office was the most straight-forward, but also the most expensive. I've heard many praise the Phnom Penh office but my own experience there was unpleasant to put it mildly (previous blog post). Once you're inside Vietnam it's a much easier process.
I like my visa agent and know she's the best in the business and I'm lucky to have found her. Though I have been hearing rumors of others doing it for less...
I took a trip to the Mekong Delta region soon after arriving back in Vietnam. This bubbling churning body of water is one of the many catfish (tra) farm ponds in the area.
Tet (Tết) is the Lunar New Year in Vietnam and was celebrated from Feb. 2-4, though in reality many businesses were closed for up to 2 weeks. This is HSBC's light display at their main office on Đồng Khởi street in Saigon. It's the Year of the Cat.
What greater tribute can be paid to a country than to brew a beer in its name? "To Capture the Spirit and Strength of America" reads the label. Were they successful? Well, let's just say I bought it for the label but won't be buying any more. 