Thread: Permission I said when entering ...

Originally Posted by Ryan_Songhurst

One time I was in Argentina it was just for 36hrs while I waited for a flight home. When I flew to Uruguay we flew Latam from Auckland - Santiago - Montevideo as we usually do but I had a Airnz flight home direct from BA to Auckland. I went on the Buquebus ferry from Uruguay to Buenos Aires and went out for dinner and stayed the night at the home of one of the fellas who had worked for us while on his working holiday in NZ. Next day he dropped me off at the airport for my flight home and as I went through customs we hit a problem... When I had got off the ferry they just waved me through customs and didn't stamp my passport or anything so now customs at the airport were quite upset about how I was in the country in the first place. They couldn't let me leave the country without first having proof of how and when I had entered. It got dangerously close to boarding time before I was taken into a room and offered the chance to fix everything for a one off payment of USD $200. I paid the money and they took my passport, came back 5 minutes later and it had a "backdated" entry stamp in it from the day previous and I was free to go. You can fix most things with a bit of currency. I didn't know if I should feel clever I had got a solution to my problem, or stupid that I had quite possibly been hoodwinked out of $200 by some kind of corruption haha

Similar-ish thing happened to me.

Flew from Amsterdam to Manchester to spend a few alcohol drenched days with a mate before returning to Amsterdam. Couple days later, at Schiphol ready to fly back to NZ and I'm steaming, accidentally join the EU passport holders lane (empty) instead of the non-EU passport holders (which was long as) and the official looks at me and asks if I'd read the sign. Confidently replied that I had, before I was corrected by her. Oops. Then she asks me if I'm a "time traveler" (WTF?!) and now I'm in DEFCON1 thinking that she knows I'm drunk as and is trying to stitch me up to prevent me boarding. Turns out my passport had been stamped with the wrong date and it needed to be corrected. So now the entire queue of non-EU passport holders is watching me as an armed Customs official leads me away to an office, out of sight.

Didn't need to grease any palms but it was a nervous 20 minute wait while they sorted everything out. Then board the aircraft and am horrified to find that there's no inflight entertainment in the back of the seats and I cannot use my devices, even in flight mode (China Southern). Needless to say that it was a rather grueling flight from Amsterdam to Auckland via Guangzhou...