"Get a real visa," he said. "This is exactly why they keep closing the border runs."
It was a birthday dinner, 11 of us at a round table in a Chinese restaurant, with a glass turntable in the middle for the dishes. The birthday was a woman I had met twice. The young man he said it to was about 26, and all he had done was ask a question. He was coming up to his third border run and he wanted to know if the land crossing was still easy. He did customer support for a software company in Canada, on Canadian hours, so he was awake all night and asleep at every border.
The table went quiet. Somebody turned the glass so the steamed fish went slowly past everybody, as if it was trying to help.
I am not going to say who the man was. He is not the only one, and it does not matter.
He has been out here since 2011. I know he did border runs for years, because I was on one of them with him. A minivan at 4 in the morning down to Ranong, then a longtail boat across the river to the Myanmar side and back again, for a stamp. He slept with his mouth open the whole way down. On the Myanmar side you paid 10 US dollars, and the note had to be new, with no folds and no marks. The officer handed back one of mine because of a small tear in the corner. The man lent me a clean one without being asked. I had forgotten that until I sat across from him at the dinner. Then he bought 2 cartons of cigarettes and pushed one of them down the front of his trousers for the boat back, which is not something I needed to see.
That was about 2015. He did not have a proper visa then. Nobody I knew did.
He is right, though. That is the annoying part.
The rules are tighter now, and they were always going to get tighter. Officers at the land borders ask real questions about a passport full of back-to-back entries. I know 2 people who were turned away at a land crossing in the last year and had to buy a flight out the same afternoon. And Thailand now has a long visa that covers people who work online for companies abroad, which did not exist when I was on that boat.
Working on a tourist stamp was never really allowed. It was just never checked. For years that was good enough for all of us, and I mean all of us, including the man at the end of the table, and including me.
So I agree with what he said. I just did not like how he said it.
Something happens in every group of foreigners I have known out here. The people who came in when the door was open start talking like they built the door.
2011 looks down on 2019. 2019 looks down on this year. Everybody who got the cheap rent and the easy stamp is angry at the next person for wanting the same thing a few years too late.
I have done it myself. I have caught myself at a table saying a town was better before, and meaning before you.
I did not say anything at the dinner. I ate the fish.
Afterwards the young man was waiting outside for a taxi, holding a plastic box of leftover fish that somebody had pushed on him, and I stood next to him for a while. I told him the boring version. Which visa people like him get now, roughly what the paperwork is, and that the letter from the bank takes longer than you think it will. I told him I did border runs for about 7 years, and that I was not proud of it and not ashamed of it. It was how things worked then. It is not how they work now.
He asked me why the man had been so angry. I said I did not know. That was not completely true.
His taxi came. He thanked me and got in the front seat, next to the driver, the way people do when they have not been here long.
I have had a long visa for 2 years now. It took a pile of paperwork, a letter from a bank and most of a week, and it has been worth every hour of it.
I could have sorted something proper years before that, if I had been willing to pay for it and fill in the forms. I did not, because the border was cheaper and nobody stopped me. That is the whole of my moral position on this, and I think it is his too.
Andrew - No Refunds •••