I’m in Chang Mai at the moment and since discovering that it’s not possible to fly to Myanmar from here, I was going to mix my plans up a bit and float down the Mekong to Laos first and then head into Myanmar after. Unfortunately for my new master plan, the Myanmar visa people have only given me until September 20th to get into their country so back to Bangkok I go to catch a flight in a few days.
Visas are something I’ve never really thought too much about during other trips. Most countries I’ve gone to in the past either didn’t need visas, issued them on arrival, or I had already sorted out a working holiday visa well in advance. This time around though it’s something I’ve had to give a lot of thought to.
In the Philippines I had to organise an extension which meant a detour into a town that I wouldn’t have otherwise gone to. Getting my Bangladesh visa involved multiple screw ups by their office and resulted in my having to hang around Manila for a week. My Chinese visa needed two renewals and an unplanned trip to Hong Kong which isn’t exactly close to Beijing. Now my Myanmar visa means I need to backtrack to Bangkok which I would have preferred not to do. Plus I’ll need to sort out a longer tourist visa for Thailand in Laos and I’ll need to figure out how to get a six month tourist visa for Australia at some point as well.
I suppose visas are a part of travelling, but I didn’t expect them to be such a big hassle! So I guess the point of this post is to give more thought than I have to the visas you might need, the places you’ll need to go to get them and how long they’ll take. Hopefully it will minimise the impact they’ll have on your trip and not mean you’ll have to backtrack and change plans like I have.
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