My Last-Minute Indian Visa Scramble in Bangkok (2013)

Travel story archive — August 2013. An account of how we nearly managed to spend as much on Indian visas as on our flights from Bangkok to Kolkata. The offices, paperwork and costs below belong to that trip.

As always my planning for this trip was haphazard and lazy. By booking flights less than 2 weeks in advance, without checking the VISA situation, I am left with a last minute scramble for a VISA.

First I find for British Passport holders there is an excess fee for an Indian VISA Application. While Fanfan (Thai) only pays 1,700 Baht; myself being British pay 4,000 Baht. Extortionate? In truth I wouldn’t have booked the flights knowing this. With added fees the visa cost near double the flights from Bangkok to India (Kolkata). On the plus side I do get to see India, which I wouldn’t have bothered with knowing the situation in advance.

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The Last-Minute Online Application

We sat down to tackle the application forms. Some of the stranger questions were about visible identification marks — moles, birthmarks, or, as I put, none. Then came a particularly hard question for us: Countries Visited in Last 10 Years. The box seemed to allow less room than our past years of travelling demanded. This was not quite the easy start I had imagined.

We got through the forms, or so we thought. By the time the paperwork was printed and the office visit was looming, my supposedly simple trip to India had become a small administrative expedition in its own right.

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A Visa Office at the Far End of Asoke Road

Back then the Indian Visa Services Office — IVS for short — was on the far end of Asoke Road (Sukhumvit 21), just before the bridge crossing to Petchaburi. The building was called 253 Asoke, opposite Rutnin Eye Hospital, and the office was up on the 22nd floor. This is the place we visited in 2013, not a recommendation or address for applications today.

From Asoke Interchange it was a fairly straightforward journey, although at this stage I was already wishing I’d checked all this before booking the flights. The main road, the building and the office itself were all part of our little Bangkok visa adventure.

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The Paperwork and the Fees Keep Coming

We arrived with our printed forms and an assortment of supporting paperwork. The pile included passport copies, photographs, flight details and our first hotel booking. Because I was applying as a British passport holder while living in Thailand, there was more form-filling involved than I had bargained for.

Then came the errors. We paid 175 Baht each after screwing up both our application forms. The period of visa and number of entries were among the things we had managed to get wrong, which meant another round of corrections and printing.

There were extra charges everywhere I looked: photographs at 250 Baht, photocopies at 5 Baht each, and fees for courier and SMS services. I remember staring at the breakdown and wondering where half of it had come from.

My visa itself was 4,000 Baht, followed by another 485 Baht for God knows what. The figures I recorded from that 2013 visit were 4,485 Baht for a British citizen and 1,785 Baht for a Thai citizen, before some of the other charges entered the picture. These were the amounts in our original travel diary, not a current price list.

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A Visa Scramble Before Kolkata

The whole thing was meant to be a quick bit of organisation before our flight, but instead it turned into a lesson in what happens when you book flights first and investigate the paperwork afterwards. Even the turnaround time was different for the two of us, which was an unwelcome detail with the departure getting closer.

Still, I was going to India. Whatever the visa had cost, we had Kolkata ahead of us, and I was looking forward to swapping paperwork in Bangkok for the noise and colour of the streets.

And that is how our India travels began: with haphazard planning, one last-minute scramble, far too much paperwork and a visa bill I hadn’t budgeted for. The sort of start to a trip I probably should have learned to avoid by then — but where would the stories come from?

More from our 2013 India travels: The visa scramble was only the beginning. Read about getting thoroughly soaked during monsoon season in Kolkata, our introduction to eating in India, and the journey north on the road to Gangtok and Sikkim.