Oh no! Visa renewal time. After living in Cambodia for 2 years now this has just become common practice. It a little bit of an inconvenience and a reasonable part of the cost of living here. I used Mottah travel when I was in Sihanoukville, but after leaving behind that shit hole of a town, where do you get your visa renewed?
Apparently all the towns in Cambodia you can get visa renewed at the local police station. These are the coppers in the brown uniforms rather than the ones that are in the blue which are the traffic police. As a side note I have never been stopped by the traffic police in Battambang. However, in Sihanoukville this was almost a daily experience. But the locals say "In Sihanoukville the police make there money from foreigners, in Battambang they make there money from the law". Most Barang wear their helmets, have drivers licenses and have motorbikes and cars that are in a good state of repair, so no money to be made in stopping them. Long may this continue!
The Police station in Battambang is located out towards the Ta Dambong statue, behind the President Hotel. It is a small and nondescript building and could easily be overlooked. There are however several Cambodian flags that are a dead give away!
Checking the status of the Visa I noticed I had about 5 days to sort it out so though "I'm on my lunch break, lets go find the building and try my luck!"
I found the building easily and though this might be my luck day. I had my Passport and a passport sized photo in my bag and the money required to pay the fee. Sadly, as I made my way into the compound I realised they kept the rather odd public service hours of Khmers. 8:00 AM till 10:30 Am when they break for lunch. Then return for the 1:30 PM till 4:00 PM shift. Open for a mere 5 hours a day. It was 11:30 PM. They were busy eating lunch and far too busy to help out a poor foreigner.
I concluded that the next day I would have to arrange a couple hours off in the morning to go and complete this task. The options being a trip to Phnom Penh, which would be at least 2 days, a trip to Siem Reap where there is apparently a large crack down on work visa for foreigners, including back dating the cost back to when you first came to Cambodia regardless of whether you had been working that time or not. The final option was popping over the border to Thailand. This held a certain appeal as it puts you back the the first world more or less. But coming back over the Poipet border is always a pain!
Time off arranged, with no loss of pay which was even better, I set off towards the Police station with my Khmer girlfriend in tow. We arrived at 7:55 AM so hopefully would be first in, best dressed! The were a large crowd of Khmers hanging around because Hun Sen had foolishly arranged a $4 passport (usually about $138!). The infrastructure is simply not set up to accommodate the number of passports the $4 fee would attract. However 300,000 Khmer have been deported from Thailand in the last 2 weeks where they have been working illegally without any documentation, which means no passport, and this is simply going to flood the local labour market and lead to hardship for the economy.
There is a separate desk for visa renewals, which is nice, and I was ushered to a chair at this desk. Passport, photo, phone number and cash at the ready all I needed now was the person who was meant to sit at the desk. In usual Khmer public service efficiency they had not yet made it to work. Oh well I thought, anytime soon! The anytime soon turned out to be an hour and a quarter later! Damn! I got to get me this gig! They said sorry, which was nice, but I knew they didn't mean it.
The actual process of getting the Visa renewal was simple! 5 minutes, exchange of passport, photo, cash and phone number. Six months for $168, not bad as the have to send all the passports to Phnom Penh. They have said they will phone when the passport is back in about a week. Hoping that it is all going to go smoothly!
Will update with the time it actually took later.
