Not your usual visa question!

My girlfriend is wondering what she has to do to get a visa for HK. She is from a small town about 2 hours from Kunming, just wondering if anyone else here has taken their friend/girlfriend/boyfriend/chauffeur to Hong Kong and if so, what did he/she have to do to get the visa.

So far my girlfriend has had about 3 different stories, everything from "visa on arrival" (bollocks I suspect) to "you have to go with a travel agency who will have someone with you at all times" (also bollocks I suspect). I know it must be somewhere in between as I see umpteen mainlanders in HK all the time. I suspect she just has to go to the local PSB in her hometown and get a permit (and maybe a passport?).

No problems.

Something to remember though is that although this is the way it was for me (having a New Zealand passport), it is most likely different for other nationalities and depends on your demeanour and the stamps in your passport. The border crossing staff the world over treat you completely differently based on what you look like, your nationality and the visa stamps in your passport. While travelling with friends from other countries I have walked through immigration 99% of the time while sometimes friends are given the third degree because they have been to Indonesia or even Italy (as in the case with my travel agent friend in France) or present themselves aggressively or as complete messes.

If your trip is limited to SE Asia though and you are a westerner, its likely you will be waved through, stamped and smiled at a lot so I wouldn't worry. China and HK are a bit more hardcore, but not by much.

Don't know about anyone else, but the number of times I have been asked to show an onward ticket for visas on arrival = 0. If you are crossing land borders I think its less of an issue than arriving at airports. But again, even flying to airports I have never been asked to show onward travel documents.

Incidentally my travel agent friend in the west said what she did was book an onward travel ticket, print it out then cancel the ticket straight away to get around this problem (though she also tells me she only once got asked for onward travel documents when going into France). I think she used one of those travel agent booking systems though, gullivers or something to do it. If you are really concerned and know someone thats a travel agent, they can probably send you a fake ticket.

The problem with Skype is they have a myriad of technical credit card rules which they don't tell you about anywhere on there site or in their terms of reference. Suddenly and inexplicably you create a red-flag which blocks your account or stops you from purchasing and gives you no reason why or how to change it. Then once you are "black listed" your only option (and this is straight from the words of their customer service) is to reverse any credit to the credit card it came from and cancel your account.

Go figure. If that's the way they want to play, I won't play with them :-)

Google chat didn't care when or how I got credit on my account, all I needed was a working credit card. OK, sweet.

I used Skype for a while, but then they inexplicably blocked my account as apparently I used 2 credit cards in 3 years and that "broke the rules". After having a running argument with them for a month (of which I pointed out it had that clause nowhere in their policy) they still didn't want to unblock it. OK, refund the money! Now I use google talk - all my gmail contacts are in one place and the quality is much better. I thought it would be as bad as skypes but its so much better - I guess google have a bigger network of (good) servers.