17 October, Istanbul
Haci Mimi Apartment 53TL

A really frustrating few days... Anxious about incurring costs, we had decided before leaving home to replace our South African sim cards with sim cards bought in each country we visited. On our first day in Istanbul way back in May, both Charl and I bought Turkcell sim cards so we could reach each other if necessary and could be reached by family should the need arise. Turkcell did not tell us the sim cards were valid for a few days only and that for ongoing use our phones would have to be “registered” in Turkey, which requires paying a registration tax, which requires becoming a temporary resident!  So we have been without phones since departing home. This proved a problem when we lost each other in Ağri on August 12, but not nearly as big a problem as being without our South African phone numbers. Without these, we cannot purchase anything online as we cannot receive the confirmation pin from our bank to finalise an online purchase. We had not anticipated this and first became aware of the problem when we tried to purchase one-way air tickets to Bangkok. Jordan Air was the cheapest option. As we could not finalise our online purchase, we visited the Jordan Air offices where, annoyingly, the ticket price was more expensive than the discounted online price. But this was a minor irritation compared to what we learned there. The staff refused to sell us a one-way ticket unless we had Thai visas. Not only were we planning to leave Thailand immediately (overland), but South Africans do not require visas for the first 30 days in Thailand! When asked what would have happened had we been able to buy one-way tickets online, we were told we would have been refused access to the plane by airport staff. Apparently very heavy fines are levied against airlines for allowing “undesirable” or “illegal” passengers to travel to countries without visas or proof of onward travel. The staff would not budge, even when we subsequently ordered, and showed proof of the order, our train tickets from Bangkok to the Laos border; nor were they impressed by a letter we obtained from the Thai consulate agreeing (but offering no guarantee) that we would be allowed into Thailand. To resolve the issue we in the end had to purchase tickets home. We could not book them for our planned end-May 2015 date as this would fall outside the 30-day visa-free stay. So we booked our Bangkok-Johannesburg leg, on Ethiopian Air, for late-November and subsequently paid a sizeable chunk of money to alter the date to May 26. Of course, on arrival in Bangkok, no-one paid any notice to us and our doings at all. Grrrr...