Thailand Chronicles 12: Crazy Scare

When we left a bar on Wednesday, I saw this beauty. A Honda CBR 400 in bright orange. I wouldn’t mind having one of these later on this year. Taken on the 21st of February 2007 with a Nikon D200 and a 18-200mm VR lens. Part of the Thailand Chronicles Series.

Well, we haven’t been able to access our bank accounts since we arrived in Thailand, even though we were assured of this by our bank in Thailand. The main thing is that I deposited a paycheck into my account on Wednesday, and it takes 3 days for any check to clear. This was a pickle for us. But then, we realized that I could go to any 7-11 and withdraw the funds.

I tried that same Friday, and it never worked. Since then, I have tried numerous banks and have not been able to withdraw any money out of my Taiwanese bank accout. In the end, it didn’t really matter, but still it’s something to prepare in advance for.

On our last day before we left Thailand, we learned of the surcharge or the PSC that every passenger has to pay before leaving Thailand. The rate has been hiked to 700BHT per person since February 1st 2007. To leave Phuket for any domestic destination, the rate has been hiked from 50 to 100BHT. Now this might not seem a lot of money right now and it isn’t really, but I have started thinking in NT dollars. The NTD from Taiwan is almost on par with the Thailand Baht, so it evens out. (Almost the same, not really. The last time I checked, 1BHT gave you 1.16NTD. The rates spike during Chinese New Year in favor of the Baht.)

For anyone who has travelled and budgeted in advance, they know this situation. Your are scrambling all your spare money and pooling it together to make sure that you have it to be able to pay it out when the time comes. However, things didn’t work out that way for us, because we had a good travel agent and we paid the 500BHT beforehand when we purchased our tickets in December 2006. It was 500BHT before it was upped to 700BHT.

Another thing you have to make sure, that the surcharge to leave Thailand is included in your tickets. We checked and it was also included in our domestic flight from Air Asia, so no worries.