Visa Issues

After I arrived in Bangkok I needed to take care of some official business, namely securing visas for Vietnam and India, countries I planned to visit in the next few weeks and who didn’t provide the more convenient on-arrival visa stamp.

Obtaining a Vietnam visa went surprisingly smoothly. I dropped off my passport at the Vietnam embassy one afternoon, paid twice the normal fee for overnight service, and twenty-four hours later picked up my passport with a shiny new Vietnam visa pasted onto one of the pages.

The next day I headed over to the Indian embassy expecting a similar experience. I walked into the embassy and checked the wall that outlined the visa process. Reassuringly, it indicated that visas were processed within 24 hours. So, I picked up the appropriate paperwork and waited for my number to be called. About thirty minutes later, I made my way up to the visa counter where the expectantly smooth process began to fall apart.

Here I encountered my first instance where a language barrier, or accent barrier in this case, caused a few road bumps in my travels. The clerk spoke broken English that I struggled to understand, catching only the general theme of what he was telling me. He explained that the instructions I read on the wall applied only to citizens of Thailand, of which I obviously was not. As a foreigner applying outside my own country, the process would actually take five days. Further, he indicated - or so I thought - that I would have to leave my passport for that duration and could pick it up once the process was completed.

Insert road bump. I'd already made plans to travel to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand and Ko Samui in Southern Thailand during that time with plans beyond that which didn't leave a lot of room for change. I wasn't quite prepared to forego the hill country of Chiang Mai or beaches of Ko Samui to spend another week in congested Bangkok just for a sticker in my passport.

I left the embassy without submitting my application and headed back to my hotel to regroup. A quick search on the internet revealed an Indian consulate in Chiang Mai, my next destination, so I quickly devised a plan to extend my stay there another day and drop my passport off immediately at the consulate to pick up on my way out of that city. Afterall, I was going to spend my time in Chiang Mai in the hill country riding elephants and visiting indigenous hill tribes where I was fairly certain I wouldn't need a passport for much of anything.

After twelve hours on a grungy train, I arrived in Chiang Mai eager to set my plan in motion. I should've realized after spending forty-five minutes walking to a consulate that was supposed to be a quick ten minute jaunt, that things wouldn't be going as planned here either.

I pushed my sweaty body through the consulate doors, picked up the now-familiar application, and dropped it on the clerk's desk thinking I was almost home-free. The clerk took my passport, then a few minutes later handed it back to me. She explained that I could keep my passport with me until I had to return for my visa. Things seemed to be better already. She then advised that I could return for said visa in nine days. Insert road bump. After explaining my issues over the last 24 hours, she kindly clarified that both the embassy and consulate do NOT actually require that you surrender your passport for the time it takes to process the visa. They just scan it initially then ask that you hand it in for a few minutes on the day your visa is ready. Seems in my haste to obtain a visa, I'd misunderstood the embassy clerk and hadn't taken the time to clarify things. She also explained that while the processing only requires five days, it doesn't account for weekends and holidays, of which there were both in the upcoming few days. Hence, nine days until I could have my visa.

Elephants or not, I wasn't ready to spend nine days in Chiang Mai and the prospects for 'swinging through' to pick up my visa were nonexistent. Bangkok was my obvious choice, so I opted to forgo the elephants and booked a return flight to Bangkok for the next morning.

The next afternoon, I found myself in the Indian Embassy in Bangkok once more. More keenly aware of the process, I surrendered my passport again, retrieved it a short while later and prepared to return nine days later for my visa, something I could've had one or two days from that moment had I took the time to understand the process initially.

However, I spent the interim eight days sunning myself on the beaches of Ko Samui where any angst my visa procurement situation caused quickly vanished with each crashing wave on the island's soft sand beaches. Nine days later I returned to the embassy and picked up my Indian visa as well as my first lesson in international communications: listen very carefully.


CHIANG MAI PHOTO ALBUM: http://picasaweb.google.com/gscottie/ChiangMai07