Visa Problems again

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Exhausted from our trip, we all woke up late and caught the last of the breakfast buffet. The visa situation (we have been stamped just until Dec 29th) is worrying and we start to investigate. What we find out is bad news: on November 25th Thailand changed the visa set up so that if you arrived via a land border rather than air, you only got a 15 day stamp. To make things worse, you can't renew this. The only option is to leave the country and come back in. This is definitely a low point. Our only thought is to visit a travel agent and see what can be done.

We have an address for a travel agent on Khao San
road, and our hotel has a free shuttle there. The street looks like some huge frat party: there are definite signs of “Thainess”, but it is packed with sunburned western tourists. When we finally find where the agent should be, it turns out to no longer exist. We try a few other agents but they can only suggest that we head back to Cambodia in two weeks and then cross again. Finally we try yet another agent at “Well Done Travel” and she turns out to be great. One of our options seems to be to fly from Phuket to Malaysia and then come back. As we want to go to Phuket anyways, this works out well and we plan a 3 day stop over in Malaysia. We make arrangements with her to buy bus tickets to Phuket, a hotel there, and the flights, and then head back to the hotel to retrieve the kids. After one more trip back to Khao San road to finish paying (as we had some issues with a Thai ATM) we buy some dinner and head back to the hotel.

At the hotel, we contact Norm, our “connection” in Bangkok about picking up the school books Pia has sent him. He kindly comes over with the books and joins us for some drinks, giving us loads of useful information in the process.

As we are all quite tired and Benjamin and I are sick with colds, we decide to take it easy until Friday and try to get some school work done rather than touring Bangkok on this first stop here.

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