The
incident on last weekend was so enraged and frustrated. When I got home, I
googled about it and found this.
Source:
http://www.thaiembassy.com/thailand/changes-visa-exempt.php
When
preparing an itinerary for this mainly a food hunting trip and a short getaway
on weekend, I googled a lot - about where to stay, places to go, what to eat.
In the process, I came across other people’s blog, sharing their experience to
Hatyai overland but too bad, didn’t find any to pre-warn about this issue.
So
this what happened –
Me and
my other 3 friends from Philippines planned for a weekend trip to Hatyai. We
took a bus from KL and bought a return tickets for the next day. We even paid
for a hotel room online.
Our
bus reached at the Sadao Boundary post to enter Thailand on Saturday 930am. It
started to get fishy when there’s a man in casual attire pulled one of my
friend and asked her for RM100 to skip the queue. She felt strange but chose to
ignore and just got back to the queue again. After checking their passport by
the officer at the counter, my friends were directed to the office at the back.
I had my passport stamped with no problem as I’m Malaysian. When I went to meet
them at the back office, I saw the same man talking shouting
to them, asked to pay RM100 or showed 10,000 THB, or else they had to return to
Malaysia. Things got so confusing at first because I never heard about this fee
and the officer didn’t try to explain nicely, instead they were extremely rude.
We’re
going to stay just for a day and do you think each of us must spend 10,000 THB
there?
We
showed the return bus tickets but they don’t care.
All my
friends have a working visa in Malaysia, but they don’t care too.
To cut
a story short, my friends were denied to enter Thailand and banned to come back
in a day. Just note that we didn’t fight and tried to negotiate properly but
still NONE of them cared to even bother.
Apparently,
this rules exist decades ago, but the implementation varies. No wonder many
people not aware of it and my Thai friends didn’t know about it either. I read
in few forums, blogs and news, some of the tourists were asked to pay up to
RM300, some of them were asked to show 20,000 THB and some of them were not
asked for anything. It’s obviously a scam and what disturbed the most was the treatment
and harassment we got from the officers.
I
respect any rules at any country, but I hope all the immigration officers also
be more respectful and more humanely.
And
here some stories I found on internet:
- https://www.worldofbuzz.com/two-malaysian-denied-entry-thailand-checkpoint-not-bringing-enough-cash/
I’m
just sharing this to let others know, even for Malaysian, that you may need to
prepare 10,000 THB to enter Thailand by land as they have a right to ask it
from you, at anytime.
Good
luck!
