Shopee

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Road to Hatyai...failed!

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:

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!

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