Getting Laos

There And Back Again: A Farang's Tale

by Michael Keefer

Part 1 - The Motivation

Growing up as an American, I gave little thought to such things as passports, border crossings, travel visas and the like. I mean in the back of mind somewhere, I knew that these things existed and people weren't allowed to move countries and live wherever they liked, but it hardly seemed important enough to go find out about myself. And sure, when I went to Europe senior year of high school, I applied for my passport, and remember being excited at the half dozen stamps my two country visit resulted in - look at me, world traveler at 18, aren't I cultured? And when I went to Australia to study for a semester, I had to apply for a student visa, but that was done simply, in an hour online. I printed out the result, gave it to the immigration officer in the Sydney airport and never thought twice about it.

The average person entering into Thailand will get a 15 stamp on their passport. You pay a little bit, they let you in, and you have 15 days to do whatever. If you really love your time here, you can spend a day at an immigration office and get an extension for 10 more days, but after that you need to leave the country. Now, this is used mostly just for travelers and people passing through for a few weeks. If you are planning on staying longer, you can go to the Thai embassy in your country of choice and apply for a longer term visa, much more permanent than just a stamp in your passport, with a date you need to leave by. The most basic of these is the tourist visa. This is what we did in Cambodia before we came. Early in the morning one day, LanguageCorps picked up the 4 of us who were going to Thailand and brought us to the Thai Embassy. There we filled out a form, checked the 'tourist visa' box and handed that in along with 2 photos and our passport. We got a receipt, and the next day we got our passports back, complete with a Visa sticker for our tourist visas. We we crossed over into Thailand from Cambodia, since we already had a tourist visa, we got a stamp saying we could stay in the country for 60 days, instead of the 15 we would have gotten if we just tried to come into the country without a visa. (And at the end of that 60 days, we could go to an immigration office to get extended another 30 days, like I detailed in an earlier post.) But bottom line, even with this 60 day tourist visa and 30 day extension, there is going to come a time when you need to leave the country.

So what does someone like me, who wants to stay in this country for a while, do? Well, you go on what is affectionately called a 'visa run' by the many other people like mean in the same predicament. Thailand isn't too picky, they just want you to leave every little while so they can keep track of you, but they don't mind if you come right back in. So we have two options. The first is just to drive to the border, cross it, wait like an hour and turn back around and come in. The pro's of this are that its easier, less time consuming and cheaper. The con is that it only gets you 15 days and you would have to do it all over again in two weeks. It used to be 30 days, and it made a little more sense taking a day to run to the border once a month, but every two weeks is kind of ridiculous. So the second option is to take a longer trip to the capital of a surrounding country, and go through the application process that we went through in Cambodia, filling out a form and leaving our passports overnight. The pro of this is that it gets you a much longer amount of time in the country. The cons are that its more expensive, longer (3.5 days vs 1) and you are dealing with more complicated border crossings, not to mention the bureaucracy of the Thai embassy. (One other huge positive is that you might be able to get a double entry tourist visa. That would mean the same thing for the first 3 months, 60 days + 30 day extension, but at the end of that, we would just need to run to the border, go out and come back in, and we would get a second 3 months by only doing a day trip to the border and not a 4 day trip to another capital. Confusing I know, but just trust me when I say the double entry tourist visa is gold among the farangs here in Thailand.)

So with our first 90 days in Thailand coming to an end, Julia and I knew we needed to do something. So we crunched the numbers, looked at all the angles, and figured a trip to the Lao capital of Vientiane was prob the best bet. So last Sunday night we caught a taxi to the bus station and hopped on a bus heading off to meet our destiny...

Coming tomorrow: Part 2 - The Journey.

TPWWLT - Frank Sinatra - I Won't Dance

PS - No more boring visa talk in the rest of the Laos posts, I promise.