Anyone who has lived in Thailand for any length of time will know what it is like to have to do a visa run, crossing the border into a neighbouring country purely for the sake of a stamp in your passport which will allow you to stay where you are a few weeks or months longer.
Thailand has an archaic system whereby foreigners are only allowed to remain within its borders for a limited period of time. If you are in full time employment here you can get a work permit which generally means you only have to report to immigration once every three months instead of actually leaving the country, but most expats will have to do a visa run at least three or four times a year.
In the past I’ve found visa runs vary from the tedious to the outright painful. The single worst experience I can remember is a 20 hour round bus trip to Penang broken up by a single night in a downmarket hotel in what can’t have been the most exciting part of town. The ten hour round trip from Phuket to Ranong isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs either but at least you can do it in a day.
My days of doing arduous trips like this, travelling purely for the sake of travelling, are hopefully over. I cover enough sporting events outside of Thailand in a professional capacity to ensure that I seldom have to do a visa run but on the rare occasions that my schedule doesn’t ensure my passport gets stamped with sufficient regularity I try and turn it into a trip which I will actually enjoy.
Going from Bangkok to Hat Yai relatively painless, just a couple of hours on a plane and then a quick bus trip to the Malaysian border but it hardly qualified as a holiday as there’s not much to see or do in that city. Instead I’ve taken advantage of recent visa runs to spend a couple of days in Phnom Penh which is one of my favourite places in South East Asia and tomorrow morning I’m off to Vientiane.
I’ll have a few drinks in a bar overlooking the Mekong, find a decent French restaurant to eat in and crucially I won’t be away from a power source and internet connection for more than a couple of hours so the whole trip won’t put too much of a dent in my work schedule. When I was living in England I barely left the country on an annual basis, let alone every few months, but in 2013 alone I did 14 trips outside of Thailand (I know because I just counted the stamps in my passport).
It sounds like a lot of travelling but the only trip I didn’t enjoy every minute of was the one I made to England, and my sole issue with that was the amount of time I spent stuck in a plane. Getting to regularly visit places like Singapore, Manila, Bohol, Cebu, Macau, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Saigon, Phnom Penh and Vientiane is a privilege, regardless of the reasons for the excursion, but the best thing about spending so much time on the road is that it truly makes me appreciate the time I spend at home.
The joys of the Visa run
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