Route guide, 2026
Le Thanh is the closest international border to Quy Nhon, and it is still 250 km away, up QL19 through An Khe and Pleiku to Duc Co. Here is the whole road, the gate hours, and the one deadline that decides whether your day works.
Distance
250 km each way, ~500 km round tripDriving time
5-6 hrs one way with stopsVietnam gate
07:00-20:00 Le Thanh, dailyCambodia gate
17:30 Oyadav closes firstPeople in Quy Nhon get told the Cambodian border is "just up the road." It is up the road, and the road is QL19, which starts on the coast here and runs 299 km inland to the Le Thanh gate in Gia Lai. Your side of it is about 250 km through towns you have probably never heard of: An Khe, then the pass, then Pleiku, then Duc Co. The run is done in a car for a reason. Public buses handle the first half fine and then leave you stranded 120 km from the gate with a border deadline running.
QL19, westbound
The car leaves Quy Nhon before first light, which means the first hour is the easiest driving of the day. QL19 runs inland from the coastal plain through rice fields and cane around Tay Son district and on toward An Khe. The town arrives at 81 km and it is a proper town, not a village, with a market and the last easy fuel stop before the climb. Buses do this leg in about two hours. A private car does it faster, but the schedule does not depend on it.
The pass begins roughly 55 km west of Quy Nhon, so you meet it just before An Khe, and the actual climb is only about 5 km from the foot of the ridge to the top. Do not let the distance fool you. It is switchbacks, heavy trucks taking the corners wide, and the kind of gradient that turns a loaded vehicle into a queue.
This is the section that eats time when the weather turns. From November through February the ridge catches cloud and rain while Quy Nhon stays dry and sunny, and a wet pass with slow trucks in front of you can add an hour without anyone crashing or breaking down. Older accounts of QL19 call this climb the Dragon's Back, and the Mang Yang pass comes a little further west toward Pleiku. Same ridge, same reason the wartime convoys hated it.
Past the top of the pass the road opens out and the temperature drops a few degrees. This is coffee country. You will pass plantation after plantation, roadside stalls selling what was picked last season, and the occasional stretch of red dirt where a truck has pulled off. Pleiku is about 96 km from An Khe and it lands around the halfway point of the whole run, both in distance and in time. If the schedule is healthy you are eating breakfast here or a little before it.
West of Pleiku the traffic thins out fast. This is the stretch where the run stops feeling like a highway trip. Rubber and cashew trees, small Gia Lai villages, and by the time you reach Duc Co district you are in border country: checkpoints, logging trucks, and the odd minivan full of people doing the same thing you are. This is also the last place with anything resembling services before the gate.
The final 60 km from Duc Co to Le Thanh is where the Polaris of this whole trip waits. Vietnam's Le Thanh international gate is open 07:00 to 20:00 every day, which sounds generous until you learn that the Cambodian side at Oyadav shuts at 17:30. Everyone drives past the Vietnamese buildings, and everyone assumes the Vietnamese hours are the ones that matter. They are not.
Gia Lai's provincial government has been pushing Ratanakiri to extend Oyadav to 20:00 so the two sides match, and until that happens the 17:30 close is what your whole day is built around.
Two gates, two clocks
Vietnam side
07:00 to 20:00 daily
Open long hours, decent lighting, and the more organised of the two halves. Immigration, customs, and a small cluster of shops and cafes that exist purely because a gate is there.
Cambodia side
07:00 to 17:30 daily
The bottleneck. Ratanakiri's provincial side closes two and a half hours before Vietnam does, and it has been the subject of repeated complaints from Gia Lai businesses about freight sitting overnight.
What that means for a visa run: you want to be at the gate by early afternoon at the latest. Someone rolling up at 18:00 finds the Vietnamese officers perfectly happy to stamp them out and nobody on the Cambodian side to stamp them in, which turns a same-day reset into an overnight in Duc Co and a second attempt the next morning.
Hours shift around Tet and the major national holidays, and they have moved before. We confirm the gate times the day before every run rather than trusting last year's schedule.
At the gate
Vietnam first. Your passport gets an exit stamp, and if there is a queue it is usually short because Le Thanh handles freight rather than tourists. Walk the few hundred metres between the two sets of buildings, and you are standing in Ratanakiri.
Then Cambodia. Most passports can get a tourist visa on arrival at Oyadav, paid in US dollars, about US$30 to US$35 in cash. Bring clean notes. Anyone whose nationality is not on that list needs an e-visa arranged beforehand, and a small land gate is not where you want to discover you are on the wrong side of that line.
Then you turn around. Same afternoon, same gate, Vietnam entry stamp on the way back in. If you filed a new 90-day e-visa before leaving Quy Nhon, that is the document the officer uses, and the 90 days start counting from the new entry stamp, not from the day the visa was issued.
One thing that catches people out: Vietnam does not issue visas on arrival at land borders. Visa on arrival is an airport procedure. Turn up at Le Thanh with nothing but hope after being stamped out of Vietnam and you will be sent back into Cambodia to sort it out properly.
Documents on the day
Two to three days of lead time is what the visa desk needs to file a fresh e-visa before your run date.
Timing
Pickup at your hotel, guesthouse, or apartment in Quy Nhon. You can sleep in the car. Most people do.
An Khe. Fuel, toilets, and a coffee and pho stop if you want one. This is the last genuinely easy place to stop before the pass.
Over the pass and up onto the plateau. Cooler air, pine trees, and the first long views back toward the coast.
Breakfast around Pleiku. Halfway in distance, with the paperwork check happening over the table: passport, e-visa, cash for the gate.
West through Duc Co. Quiet road, border country, and a couple of checkpoints where the driver does the talking.
At Le Thanh. Exit stamp, the walk to Oyadav, the Cambodia visa and entry stamp, then straight back. The border routine, start to finish, is usually the shortest part of the day.
Back on the Vietnamese side with the re-entry stamp and a new 90-day clock. Lunch somewhere near the gate before the drive home.
The return. Same road, better light, and back at your place in Quy Nhon somewhere between 19:00 and 21:00 depending on the pass and the traffic.
Fourteen to sixteen hours door to door. That is the honest number, and it is why the pricing is per car: splitting it two or three ways is the difference between a painful day and a very ordinary one.
Doing it yourself
Quy Nhon to Pleiku by public bus is a real service and it works fine. Roughly 177 km, about four hours, and you will pay somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 VND depending on the operator and whether you take a sleeper. Buses leave from the bus station on Tay Son street and from offices along the same road, starting around 03:00 and running through the day.
So the first half is solved. Now you are standing in Pleiku with 120 km of QL19 between you and the Cambodian border, and no public bus that goes there for a foreigner with a passport and a deadline. Options at that point are a motorbike taxi (not in the rain, and not for 120 km), a negotiated private car, or a very expensive afternoon.
The crossing itself takes an hour. Getting to it and away from it is the whole problem. Miss the last sensible ride back to Pleiku and you are looking at a night in Duc Co, a district town with guesthouses rather than hotels, and a second morning to try again. Add the return bus to Quy Nhon on top and the DIY version of this run costs two days and roughly the same money.
That arithmetic is the entire argument for the private car, and it is why the price is quoted per car rather than per seat. Three people splitting 3,700,000 VND pay about 1.23 million each, which is less than a return bus ticket plus a Pleiku hotel plus whatever a driver charges for the border stretch.
The relaxed version
Not everyone wants fourteen hours in a car. The other way to do this run is to leave Quy Nhon in the afternoon, sleep in Pleiku, and be at the Le Thanh gate for the 07:00 opening with a driver who has already had a night's sleep. You cross first thing, have the Cambodia stamp and the Vietnam re-entry stamp before lunch, and you are back on the coast by late afternoon.
It costs one hotel night and buys you the one thing a same-day run never has: margin. If the pass is fogged in, if a truck has gone off the road near Mang Yang, or if the gate has a slow morning, none of it ruins your visa timing. Splitting the drive also means both halves of QL19 get driven in daylight, which matters more than people expect between November and February.
Pleiku itself is worth the stop. Coffee from the surrounding plantations, a cooler climate than the coast, and a town centre that is used to travellers passing through on their way to Kon Tum or the border. Ask us when you book and the schedule gets built around a Pleiku hotel rather than a dawn start.
Straight talk
Quy Nhon can be 30 degrees and sunny while the ridge an hour inland is under cloud and drizzle. Wet tarmac on the switchbacks doubles the time behind slow trucks, and after heavy rain there are sections where soil has come down onto the road and one lane is closed. Nobody is in danger. Everything just takes longer, which is exactly what the early start is for.
Vietnamese holiday traffic fills the buses to Pleiku and slows the roads, and border staffing can change. We confirm gate hours the day before your run rather than working from the standard schedule. If your visa window is tight, avoid booking a run on the first two days of Tet.
A Vietnam e-visa cannot be extended from inside the country. Exit and re-entry is the legal reset, so the run is the move, not an option you can postpone past your stamp date. Overstays are recorded from day one, fines run in seven brackets under Decree 282/2025 up to tens of millions of dong for a year or more, and deportation review can start at sixteen days with entry bans of one to five years under Decree 59/2026. A 3.7 million dong car is much cheaper than that conversation.
Six months of validity, a blank page, and a printed e-visa. Photographs of a visa on a cracked phone screen are the single most common reason a crossing stalls. Check all of it the evening before, not in the car.
Quick answers
About 250 km each way, roughly 500 km round trip, following QL19 west through An Khe, Pleiku and Duc Co in Gia Lai province. That is four to five hours of driving with no stops and five to six hours in practice.
Vietnam's Le Thanh international gate runs 07:00 to 20:00 daily. The Cambodian side at Oyadav keeps 07:00 to 17:30, and that earlier closing time is the one that decides your day. Start late and you can miss the crossing even with the Vietnamese gate still open.
No. Visa on arrival in Vietnam works at international airports, not at land gates. If you arrive at Le Thanh with no valid visa or exemption you will be turned back to Cambodia, which is why the e-visa is filed before the car leaves Quy Nhon.
Most nationalities can get a Cambodia visa on arrival at Oyadav, and the stamp fee runs about US$30 to US$35 in cash. Anyone not covered by that should arrange an e-visa before travelling. Our 1,100,000 VND handling add-on arranges the Cambodia entry ahead of the trip.
You can get to Pleiku by public bus in about four hours, and buses do run from Quy Nhon. The problem is the last 120 km from Pleiku to the gate and back. There is no regular public service on that stretch for a foreigner with a border appointment, so most people who try it end up paying for a private car anyway, or sleeping in Duc Co.
Yes, and it is the relaxed option. Split runs sleep in Pleiku, cross first thing in the morning at the gate's opening, and drive back to the coast in the afternoon. It costs one hotel night instead of a 14-hour day in the car.
The Quy Nhon to Le Thanh run is 250 km of QL19, a border that closes earlier than anyone expects, and a 14-hour day if you do it in one go. Private car, 3,700,000 VND per car, dawn pickup, same-day return, and a driver who has done the pass in the rain more times than he would like. Message WhatsApp on 83369308237 or use the form on the homepage and you will get a total for your date and your passport before anything is paid.
Coming from elsewhere in Vietnam? Runs from Da Nang and Hoi An cross at Lao Bao instead and the Da Nang visa run site covers that road. Further south, Nha Trang visa runs go out to Moc Bai, Ho Chi Minh City visa runs use the same busy land gate from the south, and the visarun.vn hub compares every corridor if you are still deciding which border suits you.
