We had an uneventful trip home to Pattaya.Filipinos are supposed to show return plane tickets when they leave the country, but I decided to try getting Epril out without one, and if the people at the airline counter asked, I would just tell them that our next stop after Thailand would be Laos, Cambodia, and Viet Nam, and that we didn't know exactly when we would be going back to The Philippines, or what city we would be flying from. However, the people at the airport in Manila didn't ask to see a return ticket once.
(I was later to learn that we were just lucky: A German fellow with his Filipina girlfriend, with whom we shared a taxi back to Pattaya, tried the same thing and wound up having to buy a ticket at the request of one lady at the counter... a ticket which was never asked for by a different person whom they saw at the same counter 30 minutes later.)
I have to remind myself that getting out of The Philippines costs over 3,000 pesos in taxes per couple: Epril had to pay a 1,620 peso tax to immigration for leaving her own country, and then each of us had to shell out a 750 peso airport tax. (I had forgotten how much all those taxes cost from last time, and only left myself about 2,000 pesos in cash at the end of the trip... and had to hit the ATM again before leaving.)
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