The FARANG Speaks 2 Much

It’s a ritual every long-term visitor to Thailand has to endure and I dread it like women must dread their monthly bleed: The Visa Run.

Even if you can put aside how incredibly stupid the entire exercise of traveling three-plus hours to the border is to walk out of the country, get a stamp and walk back in, it’s nigh impossible to forget just how annoying the journey and the people you encounter on it are. I made my first visa run five years ago this month and I hate it more than I ever did, even though these days I only have to go about twice a year.

Yes, I do have a company and a work permit and thus could avoid the whole thing and get a yearly visa. But the financial hit I’d take from additional staff, taxes and social security payments isn’t worth it. Trust me, I checked. Most time I try to time overseas trips to coincide with the expiration of my three-month stamp, but sometimes (like last week) it’s simply unavoidable. I have to take the ride.

Two Ways to Go

For those of you who’ve never experienced the pleasure of The Visa Run, let me explain. Thailand, in its infinite wisdom, regularly does as much as it can to discourage tourists from visiting and then staying here for any length of time. If you come in on just your passport, you can stay just 30 days. A tourist visa lets you stay 60 days and a non-immigrant visa - even a “business” visa such as mine - gives you just 90 days in the Kingdom. After that, you have to leave, if even for a few minutes, before you can return.

The inane laws led to the creation of an entire industry of “visa run” companies that will take you to the border by road (or sometimes by boat) to the nearest boarder where you leave the country, hang out in a crappy casino while agents affix a Cambodia, Burmese or Laotian visa to your passport, then take you back home. For most Pattaya runners, this is 6-7 hour (at best) roundtrip journey.

When you select a visa run company, you have two main choices: the “meet the bus”-type of company or the “the bus meets you”-type. I’ve used both and each has its disadvantages.

The biggest thing going for companies that pick you up is convenience. No more trying to find a taxi to get your to some semi-closed restaurant on Soi Buakhao at 5;45 a.m. When I lived on Soi 1, it could take 20 minutes to get a ride at that time of morning.

Once yet get to the meeting place, you’re given a breakfast that sounded good on the brochure, but is smaller and less tasty than you’d imagined. If, like me, you actually sleep, shower and dress in clean clothes before making the journey, you also have to put up with the folks that don’t. Sitting bleary-eyed in a Soi Buakhao guest house one morning I had to endure three Scandies (one shirtless, of course) still downing the Heinekens at 6 a.m.

You obviously avoid all that with services that pick you up. And you can sleep later, to boot. But once you jump into the minibus outside your condo you soon realize (again) that everyone meeting at the same locale saves a lot of time.

Last week the bus was supposed to get me at 6:10 a.m. It showed up at 6:30. I was the fourth person in a van that held 10 that day. For the next hour we drove around Pattaya fetching people from places I never knew existed, including one (unfortunately) unattractive Filipina maid from a house about 17 tiny, twisting streets removed from Theppesit 17. Of course each tiny, twisting street also had speed bumps, so it took about 20 minutes to get in and out of the housing development.

Con Air on Wheels

Once you’re finally in the van the real fun begins. You get a chance to see who will be embarking on the journey into hell with you. It’s rarely a pretty sight. After five years I thought my luck would finally even out, but I’ve come to the conclusion that 98% of the people who make visa runs are the poster children for cleaning up Pattaya. Among the characters I can remember from past journeys are:

• The Frenchman who chain-smoked his way to Cambodia sitting in the front seat next to the driver, but kept the window closed.
• The drunk, elderly German who sat in the first bench seat behind the female visa agent and made lewd propositions to her for two hours before finally passing out, his head dropping into the lap of a fellow passenger.
• The Indian who bought eight boxes of duty-free cigarettes and then tried to get all his fellow passengers to each carry a box so they wouldn’t be seized by Customs.
• The aforementioned Scandies who all had disposed of their shirts by this time, and who talked at twice normal volume the half the trip to the border, removing any chance others could sleep
• Far too many 50ish Brits and Americans who dressed from the Soi Buakhao Market Catalog and had been living on 30-day visas since passports were invented. They knew everything about Pattaya and Thailand and, to be sure you knew it, interjected themselves into every conversation started for seven hours. Fortunately for everyone, this breed of ingrate has been virtually eliminated by changes to immigration laws that allow only three 30-day stamps in six months.

None of these jokers, however, held a candle to the scumbag who ended up sitting next to me last week. He never spoke, that I heard at least, so I can’t tell the nationality. But he was filthy and smelled like a pig farmer that just ran a marathon. He entered the van with a rumpled red-plaid shirt open to his hairy, bulging belly. One leg of his shorts was smeared with mud. His bird’s nest hair was matched only by the depth of his unshaven face.

And did I mention he smelled?

I was in the back window seat. He was in the middle next to me. It was truly nauseating. I knew if I didn’t get out of that seat, there’d be an incident because - if you can’t tell by now - I can be rather rude in what I say (and write) and, for sure, something was going to get said.

An Oasis Disguised as a Mini-Mart

Fortunately, visa run vans make a pit stop about halfway to the border to let everyone stretch their legs and use the toilet. This was may escape. After taking care of business, I made my way back to the van quickly and waited to see who was sitting in the first row. As people returned, those with the fresh-smelling seats lingered to let those in the back in. I made my play:

“Are you sitting in the front? I’m feeling really car sick. The back bounces up and down. I really don’t travel well. Do you think I could switch with someone?”

An extremely young, nice and likeable Brit with a “Sk8tr Boy” look and a Playstation Portable chirped up and took my spot, for which I thanked him profusely. Actually, I was prepared to pay him.

I actually felt really badly. It was a necessary lie, but one he’d quickly discover. Amazingly, he never said anything about it the rest of the day. It might have been because the seat he gave up had virtually no leg room, but I didn’t care. I simply strapped on the iPod, took a sleeping pill and passed out.

Run for The Border

Around 10:30 a.m. we arrived at the border. Most Pattaya visa run companies now use the crossing at Thep Nimitr, also known as “Ban Lam,” 172km from my Pattaya haunted house. I was one of the first people to use the Ban Lam crossing about five years ago. Back then, a few select companies were advertising the “new crossing” which was closer and free of delays associated with the popular crossings used at the time.

Back then, Ban Lam was great. My visa service at the time - Express Visa Runs - was just that. Very fast. We all met at 6:30 a.m. for breakfast and were on the road by 7 a.m. at the latest.  We were at the border by 10. Back then the Thais worked out of a small building and the Cambodians immigration agents had only a run-down wooden shack. You made sure you used the toilet on the Thai side because you’d likely catch a fatal disease in the one on the Khmer side. The whole process was done in 20 minutes. We had a quick, but tasty, box lunch and were back on the road and back to Pattaya by 1:30 p.m.

If not for the other passengers, it would have been almost bearable.

Unfortunately, time moves on. Express lost the staff that made them so efficient, their vans went to pot and, eventually, everyone else started using Ban Lam, too.

Today, Thai immigration has two air-conditioned buildings. The toilets are all new and even the Cambodians got themselves a big, air-cooled concrete immigration station. There are so many visa agents now there’s designated seating on both sides where agents sort out piles of various bits of paperwork. The process now takes forever.

And God forbid you overstay your passport, by even a day.

Apparently unable to read, I missed my stamp by a day last week, It’s a 500-baht fine, but I’d have paid double not to stand in the overstay line. The agent is likely listed the Guinness book for being the world’s slowest public employee.

Every overstay requires that two forms be completed. This is done by hand and with a half-dozen rubber ink stamps that the agent places in six or seven locations on each form. You’d think that since he knows he’s going to use many of these pages, he’d stamp a bunch in advance. But that would be against Thai logic. Or maybe he simply enjoys making farangs wait.

Each person last week took an average of nine minutes to process. I was third in line. To show you how slow the whole border run thing has become, I was told I still had 15 minutes for lunch once I handed over my passport to the visa run agent.

Casino Royale It’s Not

There are no more box lunches. Instead, for the higher prices charged these days, visa companies send customers to Thep Nimitr’s lone casino, a sad gambling joint that looks not unlike bingo night at a West Texas Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. Make your way to the back and you have a buffet of cold eggs, warm salad and dried rice and fatty spare ribs. The Coke is good, though.

In three visits to the casino buffet, I’ve never eaten much else than the rice. I bring my own sandwiches with me these days.

Most times, there’s enough time to actually play some card games, if you actually knew what they were. I’ve looked over some of the tables, hoping to find a blackjack game in progress. Haven’t found one. I’ve heard stories of some farangs playing, but, frankly,  I doubt they’d ever win. I’ve played cards with bargirls before and no matter what hand I had, I always lost, even if the same combination of cards won for one of the girls in the last hand.

Some things are better left to the locals.

Back on the Bus

Lunch disposed of and Cambodian visas secured, it’s time to go wait in more lines to get back into Thailand. At this point, you just want to go, go, go. But before you get there, you have to fight your way through the begger kids. One baht is all they ask and I feel like crap for denying them a single baht, but I’ve seen what happens when you open the pocket book. You’re likely to loose a hand, or leg, or eye.

I was almost tempted last week, though. An older girl, about 12, I’d guess, followed me farther than most of the little runts on the bridge. Her English was very good and she was quite cheeky. I think she’d been trained by Catholic nuns in Art of Guilt. She was cunning, but she ran out of bridge before I could succumb.

The line to get back in seems to take forever. The latest wait was only broken up by a chuckle from the “no smoking” sign affixed to the outer side of the immigration booth. Apparently, you now can’t smoke in Thailand, but Cambodia is still OK.

With a fresh 90-day stamp, it’s back on the bus. It’s now noon. The old 20-minute Ban Lam stop is now 90 minutes. I’m handed a bottle of cold water with which I wash down another sedative (they’re not that strong, really.) and I try to dream away the next three-and-a-half hours. It’s not easy.

The road to Khmerland is terrible. The driver is worse. And the shocks on the mini van are almost non-existent. This is true of all visa run companies and vans, I think. When I duped the poor Sk8tr Boy into taking my seat, it wasn’t a total lie. Sitting in the back of one of these minibuses is like being on a trampoline. The front was better, but you still find yourself airborne more than a few times. And you definitely don’t want to watch the road as the driver barrels along at speeds that would scare an F1 driver.

Two hours in - the afternoon always goes more slowly - we again make our pit stop at the mini mart in Thang Kwian, 91km from the border and 87km from Pattaya. There’s actually a number of stores and stalls here, but all I want to do is pee and get going. Instead we sit. All of us, at the picnic table, staring at the van. The driver is having a smoke, or a shag, or something. But we’d rather be sitting in the van, than in Thang Kwian.

At 2 p.m. we’re finally off. In the old days, I’d be back in my office now. Instead, I’m another two hours from home. Later I wake and things look familiar. My Nokia’s GPS maps tells me I’m near Pattaya. Ah, of course, we’re navigating the Jomtien hinterlands for the Filipina’s home again.

Then more traffic. My street is in sight, but we aren’t moving.

“Just stop here and open the door.”

The door slides back and freedom is at hand. I walk the last two blocks back to the condo and thank God I don’t even have to think about a possible Cambodia trip again until February.

Crackdowns come and crackdowns go. But this week’s move by city officials to shut down afternoon bars on Soi 6 and elsewhere - whether it sticks or not — has served Pattaya whoremongers perhaps their most sobering notice yet that the city’s days as a huge, sprawling open-air sex market are truly numbered.

Following a recent wave of bad publicity overseas, Banglamung district officials swept through sois 6, 7 and 8 Tuesday serving notice to bar owners that, under their entertainment licenses, they could not open before 6 p.m. and stay open later than 2 a.m. Letters informed them that, from that point on, police would strictly enforce the licenses and with violators facing fines of 50,000 baht and 30-day closures. Continue reading ‘The Pattaya Ghost #18 — Is Pattaya Ready to Kiss the Sex Tourists Goodbye?’

Responding to waves of negative publicity created by the release of a new Belgian TV drama on Pattaya, City Hall today made good on last week’s promises to crack down on scantily clad girls and bars soliciting customers from the street by closing all of downtown Pattaya’s afternoon bars.

Shortly after noon, Banglamung district officials swept through the city, ordering all the bars closed until 6 p.m. with no working talent allowed on the street. By 2 p.m., Soi 6 looked like a ghost town, with many bars closed and locked. Others, however, remained open with girls quietly poking their heads outside to alert passers-by that the bars were still open, but that all the girls were inside. Continue reading ‘Pattaya Crackdown Begins; Afternoon Bars Closed’