This week I took care of half of the paperwork for the next stop. I have two plane tickets to Indonesia and I am legally staying in Thailand. I will tell you how I got here.
Bali
Koh Samui airport is one of the most expensive airports in Thailand. There are a number of reasons for this, including the monopoly of Bangkok Airways, the short runway that limits the types of aircraft that can land and take off here, the high demand created by tourism, and finally the high airport fees and operating costs for the extra profit.
Therefore, I will not be leaving Koh Samui from the airport here, but from a port. I will be crossing to the mainland by boat, where I will take a bus to the city of Surat Thani. My flight will depart from there. I have not yet organized how I will get here, but I still have plenty of time.
The schedule is as follows:
7:45 - 9:00 Surat Thani, Bangkok flight (1:15 flight)
9:00 – 1:25 PM waiting at Bangkok airport (4:25 waiting and check-in)
1:25 – 6:40 PM Bangkok – Bali flight (4:15 flight, because there is a time zone change here.)
I mean, this was the schedule. A few hours after I bought the tickets, I received a notification about the change. So this is what awaits me now:
7:45 - 9:00 Surat Thani, Bangkok flight (1:15 flight)
9:00 – 12:10 waiting at Bangkok airport (27:10 waiting and check-in)
12:10 – 17:30 Bangkok – Bali flight (4:20 flight, because there is a time zone change here.)
The attentive observer may notice that the flight time of the second flight increased by 5 minutes. Oh, and by the way, the time spent in Bangkok also increased by about 23 hours.
I certainly could have canceled or changed the flight ticket, but after a short thought I decided to go with the flow here too. If for some reason I have more than one day in Hong Kong, so be it. As I got to this point in the writing, I booked a cheap room not far from the airport. I didn’t see anything else from Bangkok except the airport this way. At least now I’ll have time to look around this tiny town.
I don’t know where I’ll be living in Bali yet, but that will become clear soon.
The supplementary Thai visa
This part of the story is more like a horror story.
I have already used this procedure to enter Hungary once, and almost did so at the Bangkok airport.
This time I was more careful, so I read the information about Thailand on the official website of the Hungarian Consular Service. According to it, “in the case of a stay of up to 60 days: a Hungarian citizen (tourism, business purposes, occasional short-term employment) can stay in Thailand without a visa for 60 days after arriving by air, land or sea. It will no longer be necessary to extend the stay here for 30 days, but within 60 days, it will be necessary to extend the stay here once for 30 days at the Immigration Office. After leaving and re-entering the country (visa run), they can stay in Thailand for another 60 days.”
In addition, there was a sentence that made sense to me while writing this post: “Starting from October 8, 2024, Hungarian citizens will be able to submit their long-term visa applications electronically in the renewed Thai e-Visa system, they do not need to visit the competent Thai embassy in person.”
Mea culpa! The long-term visa application is very important here. I – naively – thought that I could arrange this 30-day extension online. This mistake ended up wasting almost two hours of my life. Along with my 35 EUR. I had a lot of difficulty filling out the visa application, uploading the appropriate(?) documents and paying the visa application fee. So I got much further than last time.
Very soon I received an email from Budapest, from which I learned that I had filled out the application incorrectly, the letter “á” was missing from István. Great. However, from the following email exchange I learned that I had to arrange the 30-day stay here at the immigration office. Bring on the digital life!
In the afternoon, at the evening of the Critical Thinkers Society, I told the Hungarian man and his partner how much I had suffered with the visa issue during the day and how I could not solve the problem. But I also told him that I would do everything and then I would stay here illegally for the rest of my time.
At that time, they asked me not to take this matter so lightly. The authorities have been acting with increased severity in the visa issue recently. So, I can expect that for every day I overstay, I will have to pay a fine of 500 BHT, and it is also quite possible that I will be banned from the country forever.
I looked into the reason for this strictness recently, because I hear and see that the authorities are working hard in the area in all kinds of organized actions, the results of which are bank account freezes, business closures and arrests.
The background to the strictness regarding visas is tourism and construction abuses, international pressure and security policy considerations, the expectation of compliance with the rules and finally tax and economic considerations. Many people come here with inappropriate intentions, as a result of which everything is checked more strictly.
With this information, my Thai lady friend organized a meeting for me at the immigration office for Friday.
She took me there on her motorbike and introduced me to a very good friend. I definitely needed this help with the paperwork. The office and its surroundings were bustling with people – apparently tourists – who were also standing in a long line to get close to the office.
I didn’t stand in line, I felt like a VIP again. True, this had a price. I quickly received information about my options. I could stand in line for 1,900 BHT, but for 3,000 they would process my application faster. In addition, after I had already handed over my passport, we were quickly confronted with the fact that I had already overstayed for three days, so I had to pay 1,500 BHT as a penalty in addition to the previous 3,000 BHT.
In return, I received 3 ID photos at the end of the procedure, I didn’t have to stand in line, I just had to sign a bunch of documents written in Thai. I could go back on Monday to get my passport and visa.
So, if you want to get a visa, buckle up, find a local you trust, and trust that everything will be fine. I can finally feel the experience of being here legally again. Theoretically, after this, I wouldn’t even have to leave the country on the 21st. Which became the 22nd because of the above flight ticket scam. But since I have the ticket, there’s no going back.
I’m really just hoping that my 3-day overstay will turn the extra 30 days into 24, and not 21. Because if I get a visa by the 21st, I suspect I’ll be fined again when I leave on the 22nd.
I’m trusting in the flow!
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