Did you know that you could actually get your Thailand exit cancelled? In this post I’m going to recount a dumb mistake I made as a rookie solo traveler in the hopes that you’ll get a light chuckle and hopefully not make the same mistake. Enjoy!
In December 2019, Christian and I were two weeks into our very first alone trip. We were about to take the plane from Bangkok to Hanoi and were very excited to discover a new country. However, at Don Mueang airport in Bangkok, everything did not go as planned.
Our taxi driver dropped us off at Terminal 1. We specifically asked him to drop us off there, despite the fact that he told us that flights to Hanoi departed from Terminal 2. AirAsia’s website said that AirAsia flights departed from T1, so they must be right. Right?
We arrived at the airport at 3:30 in the morning and proceeded to check-in at the automats. After doing so we saw that we were actually right next to immigration. How convenient! We didn’t see baggage drop anywhere so we figured it must be afterwards (pro tip: not the case. It’s literally never after immigration). We showed our boarding passes and the guards let us in the immigration area. We then walked towards the (short) lines when an immigration officer let us in another queue – no lines at all! Immigration was a breeze. We started to happily walk away from the desks, our big backpacks still with us.
Then we saw airport security. We looked at each other, extremely confused and slightly panicked. Baggage drop is supposed to be BEFORE security, right? This doesnt make sense?? Maybe they do things differently in Asia? The truth came to us pretty quicly: We fucked up. Big time. Baggage drop was, as it seems, before immigration. And now we had officially left Thailand. What were we supposed to do?
We tried to keep our calm and approached an officer at immigration and tried to explain our situation to him. He understood what had happened but didn’t really seem to know what to do so he guided us to another worker. He didn’t know what to do either and called for a third officer, who led us to a desk. She asked for our passports and explained she was going to cancel our exit, after which we would go back to baggage drop and go through imigration yet another time to actually exit the country.
With our red “CANCELLED” stamp in our passports we headed back to the Terminals where we found out baggage drop was actually in Terminal 2 – we really should have listened to the taxi driver.
It turns out that domestic flights departed from T1 but international flights departed from T2. We had a lot of fun running back and forth between the two! We had printed our boarding passes at T1, so T2 attendees told us to register our bags there, but once we got to T1 again we were told we needed to re-print our boarding passes at T2… Oh, and fun fact: if a terminal is empty at 3AM it will definitely not be empty at 5AM when you’re actually in kind of a rush.
What’s the worst travel mistake you’ve ever made? Tell me in the comments!
Read more posts about Thailand here, more storytimes here and more posts about Vietnam here!
