Originally Posted by
William S
Many people do hehe. I know someone who were backpacking around the world and planned to visit Hong Kong and China (with a visit to Hong Kong first). They applied for a visa back home and recieved that. But when they were checking in on a flight from HKG to PEK the checkin staff discovered that their visa for China expired just one day before the flight... Well not really caught in that technicality, but still they had to apply for a new visa in Hong Kong before they could continue.
I'm also guilty of committing a similar
faux pas, though en route to India rather than China. My employer (a think tank at my university) organized all of my travel arrangements (plane tickets, hotels, vaccinations/meds, insurance, etc), so I operated under the assumption that if a visa were required, surely they would have gotten me one. Suffice it to say, this assumption ended up being incorrect. There was perfect storm of Chinese, Indian, and US holidays at the time, so getting a visa in HK was quite challenging. Fortunately, my mom went to bat for me on the US side somehow managed to make stuff happen relatively quickly.
Sorry for the tangent.