Thursday, February 21, 2013

Updates, updates

Things keep changing rapidly in our quest to get back to Mongolia.

At first it seemed like things would work out relatively quickly, then it seemed like they would take forever, yesterday we completed going back to Australia for a while, and today...

We've applied for tourist visas to return to Mongolia. Hopefully there will be absolutely zero problems, we'll pick up those visas tomorrow and be on our way.

The next obstacle, naturally, is finding a way back to UB. There's a reason you're not meant to leave flights until the last minute. Once we hold some hot little visas in our hand we will book some tickets, and not before, but we've been scouting as best we can. So if things hold on this course, we could be back there sometime in the coming week.

Of course, everything could change again tomorrow, I suppose.

Our tourist visas will keep us in the country for a while, and then we'll need to exit and re-enter again, so this is a temporary measure, but one that at least allows us to go 'home' for awhile.

Monday, February 11, 2013

The waiting game, Bangkok

Well, we're now in Bangkok. We had a lovely time at our organisation's conference in Chiang Mai (apparently the go-to place for such conferences), and then enjoyed a very pleasant holiday in Phuket. We don't really like Phuket, to be fair, but Rachel's parents came and met us in Chiang Mai and we four went to Phuket and stayed in a fabulous hotel and there was much swimming (by Seumas), and eating pizza by the pool.

Last night we caught an overnight train up to Bangkok (Rachel's parents having departed by air), and we are here until... we leave. We have two nights in a nice hotel here (complete with rooftop pool), followed by 4 nights at a Christian run guesthouse, and then we're out of plans.

The good news is that we heard last Thursday that processes are indeed underway for us to get the right permissions to return to Mongolia on a work + spouse visa. However we're not quite sure when this will happen, certainly not before the 15th. We can stay in Thailand until the 26th our current entry, before we would have to visit some other SE Asian country.

It's tricky, because we're out of our 'holiday' mode. It might sound nice to be indefinitely in a lovely place like Thailand, but essentially we're in a kind of limbo. We aren't really on holidays, but we can't really get that much work done here, and there's no definite end-date for this hiatus.

So that's us, hanging out in Thailand and probably trying to spend less and less while we wait and see. Looking forward to getting back to Mongolia as soon as we can.