A heads up that this post is probably only interesting for people who plan to cross the border from Muang Khua (Laos) to Dien Bien Phu (Vietnam) by bus imminently.

The details seem to change frequently and there is no apparent official source of information, so for what it’s worth (and your mileage may vary) this was our experience in Thursday 23rd February 2023.

We were able to cross the border at Tay Trang landport with a Vietnamese eVisa.

Mine was applied for on the 13th and approved on the 20th, late afternoon (6 working days).

Laura also applied on the 13th (in fact, shortly after I did) but was lucky to have hers approved on the 16th at midday (3 workings days).

We crossed without a printout of the eVisa. The border guards did not seem to care that we hadn’t printed it, they printed it for us and there was no charge for doing so.

There’s very little there:

There is a shop selling snacks and sim cards. She also does currency exchange. We got 80k dong for 90k kip - today’s market exchange rate would give 126k dong for 90k kip. Rumours that it’s hard to use or exchange kip outside of the border area meant we went for this.

There’s also a cafe if you fancy your first Vietnamese coffee.

Is at this pin on Google Maps.

Tickets cost 250,000 kip per person.

20 seats total, there were 5 passengers on our journey (Thursday 23rd Feb 2023).

Is at this pin on Google Maps.

Most people seemed to get a taxi into the centre of Dien Bien Phu from there.

In our wisdom we took a spur of the moment decision to immediately get on a minibus to Sapa - we arrived at 21:30 ish 😱. It cost 270,000 dong per person - the driver stopped at an ATM en route as we didn’t have enough dong. We also stopped for lunch and dinner along the way.