Why should every blog post have a title?

SEPTEMBER 6: The visa shit went badly enough to bother writing down the story.

First thing Mondaay we went to Immigration. This city's so unplanned that there are at least 3 "city centres" that i've counted so far. We took a truck-taxi to the BTS (skytrain on stilts about six storeys above the city) station. We took the skytrain for 4 stops or something, then we had to change to the Metro (underground).

In an exasperating example of "letting the market decide" quackery, the Bangkok Metro and the Bangkok Skytrain are run by different companies and thus require new tickets to be purchased (though they are deceitfully marked on maps just like two lines of a subway system). So with two or more people, if you have to change trains it ends up cheaper to go by taxi. Bangkok, you deserve the world's worst traffic.

When after we got off the Metro we then had to take another bus to get to the Immigration department. After filling in all the forms etc., we approached the submit-application desk...which bore a sign saying extensions were granted for a maximum of 7 days for the sum of 1900 Baht.

I tried to weazel out of some of the overstay-fine money by stressing that we only realised on Friday afternoon, and that we had gone to Klong Tan police station at 9am on Saturday morning.
"No accept," said the woman at the desk, who then kindly informed us that we were to be fined 6,000 Baht, and that if we had wanted to save money they were open on Saturday morning and that we should have come in then.

I replied shrilly that the Immigration Department website stated very clearly that opening hours were 8.30am-4.30pm Monday-Friday.

"No accept," she said again. But the "we are poor, our money is only China money" plea evidently drew pity, and she made a valuable (and almost certainly illegal)suggestion: that we walk out, illegally overstay another day and get on next morning's bus to Cambodia, step over the border and come straight back, where the guards would welcome us with a 30-day visa - for free!

So the following day we got on the first Klong boat of the morning, which slices through a glassy Klong covered with rubbish. I wish this photo was better...


Departing for Cambodia from Khaosan, we then gained the valuable experience of travelling on a "VIP" foreigners' tour bus, where everyone else was on a package tour to the Angkor Wat. Two Aussie girls were behind us, talking, or rather shouting in bogan tones about how they didn't really sound very Australian and that country people "sound jus, like, i dunno, bogans". The subject moved on to their matching drunken tattoos of the Southern Cross ("it's, like, a set of stars that you can only see from Australia") to their drinking miscreances on this trip, then onto British girls who, we hear, are "feral! just so feral, like, they're just like, always talking about how drunk they were and it's like, muuuuuuuuh, omigod feral." Oh and one of them has Italian family but somehow she doesn't have to shave her legs. Like, how weird is that, djno? She's, like, a blond Italian who doesn't even shave her legs.

A Korean guy across the aisle (who also doesn't have to shave his legs) was getting angry at the foiling of his sleeping plans, so i taught him to say "shut your trap sheila" but the ungrateful bastard refused to say it to them.

[Edit: yeah we got the visas.]