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Our 60-day visa was expiring in a few days.
Thailand makes it hard for people who wish to stay in the country for longer than just a few weeks. If you enter Thailand without a visa, you will receive a 30-day permit. You can get a visa in advance from Thai embassies and some consulates, in which case you get to stay 60 days (note: 30 days and 60 days, not one and two months).
Before your permit/visa expires you need to leave the country, then you turn around and return. That’s why it’s called a Visa Run. And there doesn’t appear to be any limits to how many times you can do this shuffle, so many people probably do it regularly, thousands of them every day of the year.
The Visa Run is a big business in Thailand. There are numerous organized Visa Run Tours by bus all over the country, every day. From Bangkok the tours are generally made to Cambodia and in Chiang Mai to Burma. Here in Phuket there are two main options, both by bus – a one-day tour via Ranong to Burma (1,700 Baht = 42€) and a two-day tour to Penang in Malaysia (4,000 Baht = 100€).
Some people fly privately to Penang, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore and return the same day. My plan was to drive our rental car the 300 km from Phuket to Ranong and then just cross the border, stay one night in Burma before returning. It’s supposed to be a scenic drive up there and one night would give us a chance to see at least a little bit of life on that side of the border.
Reliable information concerning the rules are difficult to obtain. If you ask in 5 places you will usually get 5 different answers to the same question. I had heard somewhere that, if you enter with a 60-day visa (which was our case), you can apply for a one month extension, but I couldn’t get this confirmed anywhere. One tour operator told me that you only get a 15-day permit when you return from Burma at Ranong, but in the marina office they said that it might be possible to get a 15-day extension, not more, at the immigration office in Phuket. The marina manager, however, recommended that I should indeed drive to Burma because that way I would definitely receive a 30-day permit. Go figure.
In the morning of the Monday we hade planned to drive to Ranong, I decided to try to get an extension in Phuket, after all. I asked the marina manager to write a letter to immigration supporting my application for a one-month extension of our visas. As the reason for the need of an extension I told them that our boat projects in the yard had been delayed because of much rain.
I presented the letter in the immigration office in downtown Phuket, and, the days of wonder are not over yet; only 30 minutes later I was sipping a beer, with a one-month extension stamped in my passport. It turned out, that with a 60-day visa, you always get one extension of one month (for 1,900 Baht) – no explanations required! At least it was the rule of this particular day.
But it would have been interesting to see Burma. Maybe we’ll go when this extension is consumed? Our plan is to sail away before that, but who knows?
