As anybody who has backpacked in Thailand will know the on arrival visas are limited to 30 days for flying arrivals and 15 days for overland arrivals. There are two options for extending this, either paying for a visa extension or crossing a border. With our 15 days expiring we opted for the latter.
As luck would have it charting a course from Phi Phi to a visa run to Bangkok via another island is quite a straigtforward route. We originally decided to go to Ranong for the visa, borders with Myanmar/Burma, then onwards to Chumphon and Koh Tao, a popular diving destination. This would allow us to double back to Chumphon and an overnight train to Bangkok to meet some friends, Jo and Jason, Paul and Plai, for stag/hen related shenanigans on the 16th.
The visa run is fairly straightforward, get to Ranong Pier, charter a boat to Myanmar, stamp out of Thailand, arrive and stamp into Myanmar and return to Thailand. You need passport photocopy and $10 US in mint condition. A $20 was fine for the two of us. The will sell a $10 bill at the pier for a very poor exchange rate so aquire in advance. It should be possible to complete all this for less than 400tb, plus the dollers, however we payed a little more for an organised trip wanting the quickest option.
There's not much else to Ranong, we stayed at the Kiwi guesthouse which was very friendly and cheap, the owner being an arch sales women will help with organising anything, for a fee of course, although other than our visa run we organised our own onwards travel to make a saving. With a last minute change of plan we opted to travel from Ranong to Koh Phayam, reputedly one of the least developed Thai Islands and hopefully offering the quiet slice of island life seemingly harder to find nowadays.
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