I would like to double-check something that a volunteer at Chiang Mai immigration recently told me, because it doesn’t sound quite right to me.
I just got a 30-day extension of my current visa-exempt entry. Also, I’m flying out of the country on April 25 for a couple days to refresh my presence here as I can’t do another land border re-entry for another eight months apparently (I’ve done two since my arrival in October—one in December and one in February).
While helping me with the extension, the volunteer told me that prior to leaving I need to also buy a re-entry permit to come back into Thailand when I return on April 27. This sounded odd to me, as I thought that re-entry permits are only used in conjunction with visas, and not when in the country visa-exempt. I thought that when one is here visa-exempt, any air departure out of the country and then coming back in (via air) “wipes the slate clean,” so to speak, rendering any recent history of having been in Thailand irrelevant… making it basically as if I just arrived as a first-timer.
Was the volunteer wrong about this? Or is she right and it’s something I was just unaware of?
