Despite numerous phone calls, emails and reassurances to the contrary, it was in the Cambodian capital’s Chinese Embassy that we were finally told that there was no way to secure a visa for longer than 30 days on the road. We’d spent ages getting photocopies, print outs, passport pictures and forms only to be immediately turned away from the counter and we felt both deflated and panicked as we realised the only option was fly back to the UK. This presented 3 main challenges: 1) timing (when could we reasonably make the trip home? We were going to have to cut out a part of our itinerary and which was really sad after all the planning and preparation we’d done), 2) the cost (the price of return flights half way across the world was eye watering, not to mention all the flights and prepaid accommodation that would be lost), and 3) actually getting a visa (the official way to get a visa from the embassy is through an agency that required appointments which were fully booked up months in advance). There was also an added complication that Joe’s parents had a fully booked holiday for us all through Vietnam in just over a week so we HAD to be in Ho Chi Minh city for the start of that. All this meant we really only had two options: fly home now and miss out the last week of Cambodia or fly after Vietnam and miss out Hong Kong. Many hours of googling flights, phone calls home to parents and agencies in London (not easy given the time difference!) and lots of considering which bits of the trip we were willing to sacrifice later, we booked absolutely last minute flights home from Phnom Penh via Kuala Lumpur, returning to South East Asia after 8 days but this time to Ho Chi Minh. We found an expensive agency who could get our visas through an express service without an appointment in advance, giving us time to get everything sorted and still be back in SE Asia for the start of the family Vietnam trip. Phew!
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A real revelation to us was paying for an in country sim card. On reflection this was hands down the best decision we made and one we will continue to employ for the rest of our trip where possible. We struggled so much in Chile to get around that we decided to invested in a sim card with mobile data for Thailand as we were there for a month and thought it couldn’t hurt. As it turned out, it was completely invaluable for getting taxis, reading blog posts about the best places to go and sending the occasional picture home, which is always nice. It meant that where hostel wifi was poor we could still plan our days and keep in touch and it was great to have the security of Thai phone number which we could give to hostels when booking. A number of times we were running late for our suggested check in time and we had hostels email us to make sure we were still coming – it would have been impossible to confirm this and stop our room being given away if it hadn’t been for the internet access. For the sake of £5-£10 (actually under in some cases – we paid about £3 for 3 gigabytes of data in Myanmar) you can have the ability to hail a cab and call home stress free. Another pro is when you see a sign completely in another language or you’re not sure where you are, you can look it up on the internet and understand what you are seeing. It’s like having a guidebook in your pocket without having to carry an often out of date tome. We also found that blog posts from other travel blogs are actually often better than guidebooks – they are more recent and have the space to include details like exactly which bus to take and how much it will cost, saving time and confusion, especially if there is a language barrier.
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Hi! We're Alice and Joseph, currently on a year long RTW trip :) Archives
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