Visa Run

I was committed to the 10 PM departure on the ‘night boat’ to Surat Thani arriving at 5.30 AM the next morning. I had a day left on my visa and it was time to act. I’d bought a ticket which is openly branded a ‘visa run’ ticket taking foreigners to the closest border, Myanmar, and having them back on the island within 24 hours. Those doing the visa run include those like myself who are on holidays and want to stay a bit longer in Thailand/Koh Phangan and a collection of others, mainly westerners who live or work here permanently and see a monthly visa run as just part of the routine in living here. You can get a tourist visa of up to three months if you apply before leaving home otherwise you’ll receive a 30day visa on arrival at the airport yet regardless of which visa you arrive with you’ll eventually enter the visa run routine if you want to stay here for any length of time. I hadn’t thought I’d be needing to do a visa run as I was off to Cambodia, Vietnam and other places and would pick up the required extra time on my return into Thailand. Anyway as it goes the best travel plans and itineraries are those you can rip up and throw in the bin. As I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’ve done heaps of the jumping on and off of buses and trains, travelling overland and doing the whole tour routine but I haven’t ever spent any time simply chilling out on a tropical island. No Cambodia and Vietnam would have to wait. Nevertheless I did have to deal with my visa and somewhat reluctantly myself and Brett the Scotsman who also needed a new visa bought our visa run tickets for the next day.

The fact that you can buy such a ticket and arrive like a lamb at the pier and return 24 hours later without any thought or effort is an example of just how easy backpacking has become and I wasn’t going to be too much of a purist and long for the old days as I was grateful for the convenience and effortless turnaround. The travel agent explained, ‘you go pier Thong Sala 10 PM arrive 5.30 AM Sarat Thani. Minibus pick you up take you to bus then drive to Ranong. You go immigration then bus take you pier, boat to Kawthong Myanmar, visa stamp in visa stamp out, boat back to Ranong, bus to Sarat Thani, bus to Don Sak, ferry back to Thong Sala arrive home 6.30 PM. It was all straight forward enough except Brett and I had decided that if we were going to Myanmar it might be good to at least spend a couple of days there rather than basically go through a turnstile in and out of the country and enquired about this possibility. When Thai’s speak to you in broken English there are some phrases they know really well like, ‘no have’ which I often found when trying to order something off a menu and I was expecting a similarly popular term, ‘no can do’ when making such a request. Yet, after a phone call by the agent we were happy to hear, ‘yes, possible’ and equally surprised that they hadn’t thought it a good opportunity to add some significant surcharge onto the fare. The woman explained that we would have to pay a local boat operator 300 baht to get back to Ranong and as I imagined the tour company had a deal to take people by boat to Kawthong and back on the same day so that seemed fair enough.

So the tickets were bought and visa run scheduled for the next day. I was trying to imagine what a ‘night boat’ to Sarat Thani taking seven and a half hours was going to be as the ferry from Don Sak takes around two and a half and the boat I arrived on from Chaiya around three and a half. Sarat Thani was a little further but it seemed an extraordinary amount of time to get to the mainland. There was a festival down by the pier the night before so we decided to take a walk down the pier and check out the vessel we would be travelling on the next day. And there it was, the ‘Sandeemanethrup’. A huge wooden boat with two decks covered with mattresses and not much else. It wasn’t the kind of vessel that instilled a great deal of confidence as to its seaworthiness yet it was an old boat and had been doing this run every night for who knows how long so you just had to have faith that tomorrow night it would journey across to the mainland as it had hundreds of times before.click on images for larger view

I’d decided to call it the ‘slow boat to china’ as it was difficult enough to get your lips around the boats name Sandeemanethrup let alone remember it. So after the obligatory meal at the night markets and a stock up of travel food and a few bottles of Chang we were soon onboard the slow boat to china, found our respective allocated mattress and heading out of Thong Sala and into a perfect clear sky at a sedate speed. It wasn’t a bad trip at all. There was plenty of ventilation and numerous ceiling fans and it didn’t live up to the image of a sweat box with a couple of hundred people I had thought it would be and even the most determined mosquito won’t fly kilometres out to sea to annoy you. Nevertheless, I don’t think I would like to be doing this trip in heavy seas and I was happy to notice there were more than enough life jackets easily accessible all over the boat.

The boat arrived in Sarat Thani as scheduled at 5.30 AM just on daybreak. I’d awoken a little before this realising we were getting close to the mainland by the sound of passing fishing boats, the smell raw sewage and the welcoming committee of mosquitoes. The rest of the journey across the peninsular was fairly much as you would expect being escorted onto the minibus then bus and some hours later arriving at the Immigration office in Ranong. We soon had our exit stamp but peculiarly this is the only immigration office I’ve been to where you don’t get your exit stamp immediately before entering the next country as if there is an invisible line that you cross with passport in hand then receive and entry stamp for the following country. Once everyone in our group had been processed we were all efficiently directed back to the bus which would then drive down the road to a local jetty. When I said we all got back on the bus after immigration there was one person who didn’t. An ugly meatloaf mid forties German guy wearing a t-shirt with a drawing on the front of two fat beer bellied yobbo’s with a beer in each hand and one giving a sheep sex up the rear end and the other facing the other way getting oral sex from the sheep and some stupid caption of, ‘sometimes you need a little team work’. When you see people like this you just wish they’d stay home or fall off the face of the earth and just what is going on in that space between the ears? Anyway, I wasn’t too concerned about his plight but I did wonder where he had ended up. Hopefully in some back room with a Thai Immigration official similarly offended scouring his passport and details looking for some shortcoming in his documents allowing him to deal with this person in the manner he deserved.

We were all minus one soon at the local jetty which the word hectic if probably far too tame to describe it. Anywhere or by any means that you travel in Asia, be that train, plane, bus or boat there are always touts competing for your business with people trying to led you this way and that and gain your business. When you first arrive it takes awhile deal with but after a short period you soon learn to be single focused and ignore a lot of it. The beauty of being on a packaged visa run is that the guide soon ushers you onto an awaiting boat and your off without having to haggle with numerous people over price and so on. On my first journey across to Koh Phangan it had been on a large spacious boat with air con, soft seats with food and drinks available. When the travel agent had said we would catch a boat from Ranong to Kawthong I wasn’t expecting similar as it was only a half hour trip across a river delta and had no real expectations but soon realised as we were walking down a plank at the pier that boat in this instance was going to be a trip on a ‘longtail’ which I suppose is a boat by definition. A longtail is a traditional Thai wooden boat and is pretty much like a scaled up version of a canoe with a huge motor placed at the rear with a long shaft with a propeller at the end. They are used in Bangkok, around the islands and doubtless numerous other places as a popular why to move people and goods about. Nevertheless they have never struck me as a particularly stable craft and always found boarding them a bit of a leap of faith. They are a totally open boat with not particularly high sides and it doesn’t take too much imagination to see them swamp and sink especially when waves and wake often come within inches of the edge of the boat. So I boarded the boat thinking here we go again another appeal to good fortune.

It takes around half an hour to cross the delta which is probably about five kilometres wide at this point. There is a small Thai immigration hut on the edge of the river about five minutes out from the jetty where the boat boy collects our passports and hands them up to an immigration official probably just to check that all the people who had there passports stamped earlier where actually on the boat. Apart from the roar of the motor which I think the Thai’s feel obliged to remove any form of exhaust or muffler system from it is fairly spectacular scenery punctuated by some lovely Buddhist buddas and pagodas in prime locations. In Eastern Europe I had to be careful I didn’t come home with nothing but photographs of old historic buildings. Over here I am aware of just how many photos I have taken of buddas, temples and longtail boats but I did catch a few good photos of same on my way over. We were about half way over when I realised there wasn’t one life jacket on the boat and a long swim to shore yet there is so much boat traffic between the two ports you wouldn’t be in the water too long before someone came and pulled you out. I joked to Brett that they would probably ask you for a hundred baht before they did. Well, they are probably not that unscrupulous but they probably would when you arrived at the dock and just as happy to receive a wet 100 baht note as a dry one.


After a quick run through the immigration control we were in Kawthong and immediately mobbed by around six young guys. This is not unusual but these guys just wouldn’t let you go and stuck to you like glue following you wherever you went and no matter how persistent you where or how often you told them you don’t want anything they just kept following and asking questions. Within ten minutes of being there we had been offered among other things, viagara, opium and bang bang, (you can guess what that is). Brett and I decided to take sanctuary in a café but they followed us in and sat at the tables around us then followed us down to the hotel we checked into. At one point one of them garb me by the arm and tried to led me somewhere and I shook his grip straight off and looked at him with piecing eyes and pointed my finger straight at his face and said, “don’t you dare grab me”. I don’t think he understood a word I said but I think he understood exactly what I meant because he didn’t try it again. We did eventually rid ourselves of this nuisance or at least Brett did. I’d taken a shower and Brett had come across them all again waiting in the lobby ready to follow him down the street. In Brett’s words he said he had to be ‘less than polite’ with them. What ever he said it worked because we weren’t hassled by them or saw them again.


We’d checked into the Honey Bear Hotel. A peculiar name for a hotel in Myanmar I’d have thought. There were few accommodation options in Kawthong. Nearly everyone that comes here is simply on a visa run. Few even leave the pier or venture past the shops nearby to purchase cheap whiskey and cigarettes before getting back on the boat and leaving. The Honey Bear Hotel is the best hotel in Kawthong but that is not a claim to prestige but a fact that it is the only one.
When we walked into the lobby to check in it was all rather peculiar as if we were a novelty like, ‘costumers, we don’t get many of those here’. It was a four story building and stood above most of the other single story buildings. It was far from luxurious with tattered carpet and very basic furnishings but to the average Myanmar living in poverty they considered Brett and I to be wealthy foreigners to be able to afford to stay at the Honey Bear. Global economics are a funny thing aren’t they. My gene pool touches down in Australia and I am afforded a life of relative privilege and someone else’s gene pool touches down somewhere else and they are destined to a life of squalor.

Anyway, the Honey Bear was reasonably more than we’d been paying for accommodation in Thailand and given that the Myanmar economy is far weaker than that of Thailand it was way overpriced for what it was but given we were only going to be in town a couple of nights and it did have the novelty of air con which we hadn’t enjoyed for a long time we thought it was a good option. The hotel porter walked us up to the top floor with the key and showed us into a room with a double bed. Brett and I both looked at each other. I think they have got the wrong idea here and quickly said, ‘two beds please’. With a bit of a search for another set of keys we were soon shown into another twin room. I went over to the air con eager to switch it on as it was boiling outside. The porter looked at me and said, ‘no fire’. I thought about this for a moment and thought sure then went back to trying to get the air con on. The porter then looked at me again and said, ‘sorry, no fire until 2 PM’. I was starting to get a little confused at this stage and wondering if I was going to have another faulty towers moment like I’d had in the communist room in Warsaw then realised he must be getting the word fire confused with the word electricity. Learning a foreign language isn’t easy and I’m sure I’ve probably told someone there baby looks like a dog or similar when I first started learning Indonesian. OK I said no problem, we’ll go for a walk around town and be back later when the fire is on.

Kawthong is not a city to get excited about but it has a quite shady area under jacaranda trees along the river at one end, a well kept garden and memorial on the top of a knoll overlooking the river and a fairly spectacular Buddhist temple on the top of another hill with great views over the city and down to the river. Apart from that there is little else worth mentioning. We took off for a walk around town in the blistering sun to get some food and have a look around. You could tell by the looks we received that foreigners walking around were a rarity. The locals weren’t looking at us with any degree of hostility but more of puzzlement as to why the hell anyone would want to hang around in Kawthong. As we walked down one back street a man was waving at me to come over. His daughter of around two was at his feet and it was obvious he wanted her to see a foreigner which she had probably never seen before. As I got closer I gave her a little wave and said hello and she burst into tears. Now I know I can have this effect on woman but this poor young girl was obviously frightened by what she saw as the big white giant. It was pretty funny really, maybe she thought I was going to eat her and considering how she would taste in a curry.

We did a fair bit of walking around and you could tell by our reception that we were walking into neighbourhoods where they had never seen foreigners walk before. It is a bit of a strange feeling being seen as such an alien but we never felt any hostility. One thing that I did notice which was peculiar was the openness and friendly smiles we received from the woman. There was nothing sexual or anything of that nature about it but an open and charming smile they often gave which is so unlike much of what I have experienced in Asia where the woman are reserved and eye contact very limited.

After going back to the Honey Bear and finding that the fire was now not going to be on until four we headed back out in another direction. After walking some distance I noticed a set of stairs that seemed to go on forever heading way up the side of a hill and thought it must be a rear entrance to the temple you could see from town. They were old and broken and from the covering of slim and mould you could tell they were rarely used. You couldn’t see the temple from where we stood but I felt sure that is where they would led when I considered roughly were we had walked. When you are already soaked to the bone in sweat in humidity that felt around 99% it takes awhile to commit to a steep climb seemingly to the heavens but then again would I ever be back in Kawthong? Probably not. So off we went. About half way up I could start to see part of the temple so at least the knowledge that it wasn’t an exercise in futility made the climb a little easier. At about the three quarter mark the strangest thing happened. I noticed a little door in a wall to the right then suddenly a small robed monk come out smiling broadly. He was trying to indicate something to us but as he wasn’t able to speak as part of his religious order it made it fairly difficult to work out what he was trying to convey. I thought perhaps he didn’t want us to proceed to the temple using these stairs then I managed to recognise that he wanted us to wait there one moment while he went back inside. My immediate thought was that he might be getting us a robe or sarong or something to cover our legs or in some way be more appropriately dressed for the occasion. We both waited there a short while not knowing what this smiling monk would reveal when he returned from the small door in the wall. Faintly I saw his figure emerge through the darken doorway and noticed he didn’t have robes or clothing in his hand. He indicated to me to hold out my hand and placed a ten Kyat Myanmar note into the palm of my hand and gently closed my hand around it then held his hands together in the blessing position and bowed his head then proceeded to do the same with Brett then softly walked away and through the door. Brett and I just looked at each other in amazement. What was all that about I thought. I could only assume that as the Buddhists believe from giving comes good fortune he had been pleased to see us and wanted give us something. I thought perhaps as Myanmar is such a closed, dark and brutal country that he saw our presence as foreigners as a good omen. Whatever the reason I did feel rather humbled as I proceeded up the final section of the stairway to heaven.


Once at the top you realised that it had been worth every steep up the steep climb. It was glorious both in the pagoda itself and the view. It was close to dusk when we arrived and it was easy just to sit and take in the ambience and view out over the river. On the way out Brett dropped his ten Kyat note into the donation bin at the front entrance but I hesitated. No I thought. I’ll drop some baht into the bin but I’m going to keep this note and the image of the smiling monk for the rest of my days. We left by the front entrance which was much easier going and headed back to town to get dinner and by the time we’d ordered and received our meals it was dark. About half way through the meal the lights went out and a young boy came around to the tables placing candles. When he came to our table he said, ‘fire is out’. I sat there for a second and thought, hang on his guy is calling power/electricity fire also. I could understand one guy getting a word mixed up but how can two people make the same mistake. They must think of electricity and fire as hardly indistinguishable and I considered that until very recently in these communities fire would have been a basic element in everyday life from cooking to lighting so with the relatively recent arrival of electricity in these places the English word they used, fire, was appropriate to use to describe cooking and lighting with electricity. I started to feel like I really was in the back blocks of the world here.

We finished our meal and headed back to the Honey Bear. Kowthong is not the kind of place you want to be out in at night. Large parts of the city are totally blacked out. The whole electricity system is so dysfunctional that they keep parts of it going by placing large industrial generators here and there and patch into the system but in other areas there is nothing at all but total darkness. The last part of the walk along the river bank towards the Honey Bear was without power and you could see very little other than a few shadowy figures moving about. As we approached our hotel it was good to see it light up and I noticed they had there own generator humming away. Obviously there had been no fire there all day as a means to preserve fuel rather than anything else. We decided that the best thing to do when staying in the very best hotel in Kowthong was to buy a bottle of whiskey and spend the night in with the air con turned on full.

Brett had been suggesting earlier in the day that we should try and hire a car and driver and head out of Kowthong and see a little of what was out of town. I wasn’t really keen on the idea not least out of concern of meeting Myanmar police or army asking just what we were doing and also that there wouldn’t be very much to see anyway. I had suggested that he could go and check out the possibilities and prices and let me know what he came up with hoping he would get frustrated and give up on the idea. He’d come back sometime later explaining how impossible it was trying to explain to anyone what he was trying to organise. Good I thought, that’s that idea canned. After a couple of whiskeys that night I was surprised when the subject came up again. You know, I think we should try again tomorrow and get out of town and we’d probably find a little village somewhere, what do you think he said. I turned to him and said, Brett it’s not that I want to stay in Kowthong but I think you have unreal expectations of what your going to find out there. The theme in these third world countries is much the same. When you leave the cities it is the same destitution, poverty, filth and desperation, it’s just spread a little more thinly over the landscape. We’re not going to get in a car and drive over a couple of hills and find some little utopian village where the head of the village will meet us with a glass of pure water from a pristine stream then invite us for a tea ceremony and perhaps some Myanmar dancing. There isn’t some sign somewhere just out of town with an arrow pointing Burma World 100 meters. We both cracked up at this point and it provided for a few good jokes over the next couple of days with references to Burma World.

Next day we decided that one night was enough in Kowthong as we had fairly well exhausted all the possibilities and after the peace and tranquillity of the island spending another day in blistering heat in a dysfunctional city didn’t have too much appeal. We decided we’d get a boat back to Ranong then pick up the visa run bus back to Koh Phangan. Off we went down to the Immigration desk at the pier to get our exit stamp and proceeded to the counter. The official looked at the passport then handed it back to us saying, ‘already’. Already what I thought and looked closer at the visa stamps. Oh dear. It seemed that we had been stamped as exited the day before. I then remember Brett saying we have to go to a second desk to get a second stamp when we arrived and hadn’t thought anything of it but the second desk must have been the departure desk where we got a departure stamp. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t go looking for Burma World or we might have had a bit of explaining to the police or army as to why our passport showed us as departed.

We were soon on a longtail heading back to Ranong and hoping that there wouldn’t be any problems with the Thai Immigration officials asking us why we hadn’t passed through immigration for over 24 hours which is what the visa stamp suggested. Little did we know however as the longtail roared towards Ranong that we still had a couple of dramas ahead of us before we had to deal with immigration. About half way across I noticed a huge high power catamaran to the left at some distance then heard the longtail motor start to roar even louder and realised the driver was trying to pass before the catamaran. I could tell that we weren’t going to make it and possibly on a collision course but the longtail driver was determined to cut in front. Everyone on the boat started to take notice of the approaching boat and you could tell there was a silent but unanimous belief of impending peril. Thankfully the driver gave up but we then all became just as concern by the huge wake from this boat which was coming towards us. Even the locals who are generally unconcerned about these things were bracing themselves for the wake which was peaking like a wave and could swamp the boat if it hit from the wrong direction. With a mixture of luck and skill we managed to pass through and we all gave a collective sigh of relief. Oh but there is more. We start getting close to Ranong and into the estuary that leads to the pier then suddenly the roar of the motor stops. Oh good one, we have just run out of fuel. A combination of a strong current and the drivers attempt to out run the catamaran had used all his fuel. You do sometimes wonder about some business practices in Thailand and I couldn’t help thinking while drifting towards the rocky river bank would it be too much of a luxury for these longtail drivers to have a few spare litres of fuel stashed somewhere on the boat just in case. We were almost at the shore line so I wasn’t too worried about my safety but we were already running a little late on catching the visa run bus and I knew this little episode would probably dash any hope we had of connecting with that.

Anyway to finish a fairly long post another longtail did come alongside fairly shortly and tow us into the pier but we did miss the bus, however we passed through immigration without any problems without the raise of an eyebrow. We spent the night in Ranong and actually had a great time and thought it was a great town which we would never have experienced if we hadn’t been delayed and that is probably the best part of travelling when the unexpected is often the best. We were on the bus the next morning and were seamlessly transported back to Koh Phangan. Needless to say we did chill out for a couple of days to get over the journey. I have been meaning to write to the blog for sometime but at the same time using my time to refine my procrastination skills which I must say have been developing fairly well here. Transavante out.