New to This Posting / Thread
Hi all.... Been mostly on the "Tijuana" part of this site, but sometimes I keep an eye on this part as well (Thailand). Planned to go last year in October, but the trip fell through with a couple of friends at the last moment. Not fun at all. The plan was to spend 5 days in Pattaya, 4 days in Chiang Mai (Am I spelling that right? And the last 4 days in Bangkok. My friends mostly wanted to do beach stuff (cool with me), but my interest was in three (3) areas: Food, Golf and the Female persuasion of course. However, as for the golf, I realized that a lot of the courses I wanted to play required a taxi or whatever to get there and they were like $60 or $80 round-trip as well as an hour or so away. Does anyone here have any thoughts about this? Also, most of the courses didn't seem to like the idea of booking a round / tee-time for a "single" player. It seemed like a real hassle actually, but there were courses there that I really would have like to have played. The plan is to still travel there this year (perhaps Sept. Or Oct.). Anyways, it sounded like a cool trip, but any thoughts that people here might have about where to go for golf would be appreciated. Also, does anyone have any thoughts about the idea of spending 4 or 5 days in each of the spots I listed above?
Trip booked and Issue with Passport Validity
Hi all,
Just thought of sharing this incident with you guys, it might help you of you face a similar issue with passport validity.
My friend and I had planned a trip to Thailand for the 6th of February, mid December we had booked our flight tickets including bookings for all the hotels and tours when I realized that my British Passport had only 5 months validity left, so I went on the Thai Embassy site to look for information regarding the rules for passports which are about to expire, on some pages of the site I saw that it said 3 months validity was required and on some other pages of the site it said 6 months. I was confused, worried, and panicking so I called up the Thai Embassy in India and no one was picking up the phone. So I sent them an email and told them about my situation, the Consul I was in contact with via email was rather helpful and she said that I would most likely not face any issues while entering Thailand, I was very skeptical of her reply and told her what I had read on the website, she then told me that if I was worried I could apply for a tourist visa and that she would issue me on my passport. After I asked her if it guaranteed me entry into Thailand, as I didn't want to take a risk as all my bookings were done, she said at the end of the day it is up to the Immigration Officer to see.
I checked the British High Commission website and it said that it would take around 8 weeks for them to do a renewal from India, now I was really worried and didn't know what to do, I thought I'd have to cancel the bookings of me and my friend and loose a lot of money in the process. I thought I should at least download and fill out the form for renewal, so I downloaded and printed it, it had to be fill in by hand, on the site it was also mentioned that if I need to travel urgently and I didn't have my passport with me or it had expired or was stolen I could apply for a Emergency Travel Document (Emergency Passport) at the British High Commission in Mumbai, the travel document would be valid just for this one trip.
So I filled in the renewal papers for the passport and submitted them on the 31st of December 2015. I called the British High Commission in Mumbai and asked them regarding the Travel Document, they said they would be happy to help me and that I would have to book an appointment 2 weeks before my travel date from their website and bring proof of my passport renewal and some other photo IDs and they would issue me one on paying £90 for the application. I downloaded the form and booked the appointment for the 21st of January 2016.
10 days after I had submitted the passport application, I got a message on my phone from DHL saying that my passport was on its way to me. I was astonished at the turnaround time for the renewal process. 2 days after the DHL message I got an email from the office from where I had submitted my application to come and collect my passport. Canceled my appointment with the Embassy and relaxed.
I thought I would have to do a lot of running around for the Travel Document but in the end everything turned out to be fine.