After a long and uncomfortable ride on a night bus from Chiang Mai, I made my way to the Canadian Embassy in Bangkok where I spent about 3.5 hours filling out forms to apply for a new passport. Even though my passport was still fully intact and readable, they treat it just like a stolen passport and, because I’m out of country without physical access to my birth certificate, I had to provide contact info for six non-family references and I was now limited to just a 2-year validity on the new passport. Since the final six months of a passport are effectively useless, that makes it useful for about a year and a half. Enough time to apply for a brand new one from within Canada I suppose.
Applying for a new passport normally takes about three weeks but the lady said she’d start contacting my references right away to speed up the process so I could hopefully get the new passport before June 24th, otherwise I’d have to pay a daily fine for each day I overstay my Visa-free entry. Ruining my passport effectively ruined the rest of my plans for Thailand, except for a dive trip I paid in advance for that I had no intention of missing out on.
Every other traveler I have met in the last six months has been traveling in the opposite direction of me so I didn’t have any luck finding someone to travel with for even a brief time except for a couple people that were interested but had already depleted their travel savings and now had to fly back home.
Over the last several months, I was surprised to hear from some solo travelers that they often use Tinder as a way to reach out to other travelers or even to get to know locals. I only knew Tinder as a hook-up app but the reasons for using Tinder made a sense so I figured I’d give it a shot. Tinder is entirely proximity-based and, with the Tinder Gold service, you can change your location to wherever you want, making it easy to start finding matches long before you arrive at that destination. I signed up after a few days in Cambodia just to see what it was like and I made sure my bio stated I was looking for travel buddies, not that anyone reads that anyway…
I matched and connected with a few travelers in Cambodia but, again, I was on a very different route or timing didn’t work out so I didn’t get a chance to meet any of them.
I thought the much larger pool of travelers in Thailand would make it easier to find a travel buddy but the much larger population meant it was tough to find those foreigners in the massive pool of local Tinder users. I had to change my settings because I was getting Like notifications constantly. I had about 500 people “Like” me within the first day in Bangkok and it was too time consuming to look through all the profiles so I decided to leave the Tinder app alone and maybe look again once I had moved to a much smaller city.
One night while staying in Pai, I opened the app and made an accidental swipe. When the Tinder app opens it opens straight to a person’s profile for you to view. And because I had so many likes from Bangkok that I didn’t completely purge yet, the app will usually load a profile from the pool of people that have already liked me.
But when you have a poor network connection, the app opens to a white screen until it fully loads a person’s profile. That bright white screen attracted some flying insects in the drafty room and I flicked a tiny one off my white screen. That flick ended up being the gesture to Superlike the profile that hadn’t yet loaded in the app. Once the profile finished loading, I saw that I Superliked a Thai girl named Ann from Bangkok who is a year younger than me and works as a tester and workflow analyst for a local software development firm. I thought she was cute and she had a photo of her next to a cool Honda MSX motorcycle so I said hi, just to chat because I had no plans to go back to Bangkok at that point.
However, after ruining my passport a few days later, I knew I had to make my way to a Canadian embassy as soon as I could to get the process going on applying for a new passport. There was an embassy in Chiang Mai where I was at the time but it wasn’t open for a couple days and I knew I’d have to come back to the embassy to pick up the passport again later. I had a liveaboard dive cruise I had already paid for coming up in a few days in Southern Thailand that I was really looking forward to so I decided to catch a bus back south to Bangkok to visit the embassy there.
Ann and I kept chatting and she wanted to meet me. I had nothing else to do aside from dealing with my passport issues so I agreed and we went out for dinner the next two nights.
I then left to go on the amazing dive cruise for a few days. I actually missed my bus from Bangkok to Phuket because I figured three hours was plenty of time to get halfway across the city. Nope, it took three and a half hours to get through traffic and then I had to pay for another ticket for the last bus of the day. Several days after the diving trip, I caught another night bus back to Bangkok to await my new passport. During this third stop in Bangkok, Ann and I met up again and we spent the week together. I received my new passport and got it stamped at immigration a few days before I had to leave the country but I had really taken a liking to this Thai girl and we both wanted to spend more time together so I spent my last weekday in Bangkok going back to Immigration to try applying for an extension. To the Immigration Officers, it’s really just an opportunity for easy money. I hadn’t even finished filling out the forms and the lady was already placing approval stamps on the form. Just like that, I had another 30 days to stay in Thailand.
Ann lives in a small city on the outskirts of Bangkok and it didn’t make sense for her to deal with the long commutes nor did it make sense for me to keep paying for hotels so she invited me to stay at her place, a nice modern house in a quiet gated community not far from the ocean.
It was a lot to decide on in such a short time but I really enjoyed being with her and didn’t want to leave the country just yet. It all seemed like a crazy idea but, the more I thought about it, I realized there really isn’t anything aside from immigration rules stopping me from staying in Thailand. For the first time ever, I don’t have a job or other obligations I need to get back to or anything else holding me back so I decided to just go with it and see where this leads. Sure, there’s a slight bit of risk to it but it’s a new and exciting challenge and an opportunity to fully immerse myself in a new culture. After all the other things that had been going wrong for me in the last month, this was one thing that was going really well so I decided to stick around and see how things play out.
Before traveling, cultural and language differences could very likely have been a deal breaker for me. Maybe it’s just a testament to how much I’ve changed or adapted in the last six months but these differences mean very little to me now. I’ve had to develop a whole new level of patience and compromise over the last six months that makes a foreign relationship no longer seem like a crazy idea.
The day before I was originally planning to leave Thailand, I started having some issues with my ears. My left ear in particular felt like it needed to pop but nothing was helping. It would pop at times but still felt like I had too much water in my ear and it was effecting my hearing and making me extra tired.
After a few days, Ann’s neighbors took me to a hospital where an ENT confirmed I had an excess of fluid in my ears that is likely a result of diving. I haven’t had issues from diving before but I also haven’t done that many consecutive dives. I did eleven dives over three days, some very deep and most were multi-depth. I also had a tougher time equalizing on some dives than I normally do so I had to descend more slowly.
I didn’t develop symptoms until a week later but the ENT said the fluid bubbles will go away in about a week’s time so he prescribed several expensive antibiotics to take in the meantime and told me to avoid diving, planes, and high elevations until then. It took a bit longer than a week for my hearing to return to normal.
Since I plan to stick around in Thailand for now, this will be my last blog update for a while. I'm going to stop and try to work for a bit to replenish my savings as well. While traveling through Asia hasn't been overly expensive, my usual routine bills and payments back home have been eating away at my savings much faster than I'd like. To make matters worse, the tenants that moved into my condo were evicted for failure to pay up after only a month and a half. I'm hoping now that summer is in full swing, there will be a larger and better tenant pool so my condo starts generating some travel funds for a change.
I’m sure I’ll travel more in Thailand at times but, for the moment, I’m going to stay put in the sunny Land of Smiles and see what it is really like to be an expat. It’s not exactly a continuation of the travel adventure I began with, but it’s an adventure nonetheless and one I'm no less eager to experience.
Click the image below to open the full gallery of photos I took during my travels in Thailand