Bananas

Day 50: Halong Bay (VN) – Hanoi (VN). “Maybe we can enter Thailand at Poipet, then go from into Laos and then re enter at the border crossing near Vientianne” I said, spreading some more strawberry jam on to my slice of toast.

The sailing junk continued on its course through the bay while Karen and I tucked into to a hearty breakfast. We listened intently to our French shipmates, Stephanie and Fred recounting their travelling tales from 8 months on the road taking in South America, New Zealand, China and now, Indo-China.

Since leaving England back in January, the Thai government in it's wisdom had decided to change it's immigration rules for European nationals which was now affecting all of our travel plans, hence the hot topic of our early morning conversation.

In a seemingly money motivated move aimed at hitting backpacking travellers, whilst protecting the higher spending tourists, visa durations had been halved for those crossing a land border rather than flying in to the country. In addition, the rules around multiple entries had been revised, which from what we understood, was causing no end of confusion and injustice at the various border control points. On top of all that, the UK and French Foreign Offices were also warning their citizens not to use the land borders at Chong Jom or Choam Sa-Ngam due to the levels of tensions between the Thai and Cambodian military. “Take no notice of that”, Fred said. “It's just governments being over protective”. Maybe he was right, I thought.

Now I'm no politician and I don't claim to know anything about macro economics, but it seems to me that when close on ten per cent of a countries gross domestic product is generated from tourism and with the world in financial meltdown, the last thing you would want to do as a government would be to drive away dollars, euros and pounds. But that was precisely what this new directive was going to do.

Clearly, this was going to affect our plans, but we didn't know how. And right now, the truth of it was we didn't really care. We were in Vietnam, and Thailand was weeks away yet. “Pass the sun tan lotion, can you Karen!”

PS If you happen to be a Thai border control guard reading this, we'd like you to know how much Karen and I are looking forward to meeting you and visiting your wonderful country. I do hope you didn't mind our little joke about your government – I'm sure they know what they're doing really!. You do have a sense of humour, right!?