In the immortal word salad of George W. Bush, Fool me once, shame on shame on you. Fool me – you cant get fooled again. By which he clearly meant that the first time you do something, you can be forgiven your ignorance, but if its the second or sixth time, you have obviously failed to learn from previous experience. And yet, here we are again, moving overseas with a cat. Evidently George isnt the only one with questionable mental faculties.
Rewind to three years ago: we left Bangkok with a kid and a cat. Then Covid happened, and we got Covid stranded in middle America. This was very tolerable despite the rational assumption that nothing in middle America is very tolerable. We took walks, enjoyed fall colors and winter snowfall, puttered about the yard, built fairy houses, and stayed home. Virtual kindergarten was ridiculous, but life was relatively pleasant. Getting back to Bangkok, on the other hand, was definitely not.
It started with the garden variety irritants of airlines, visas, and embassies. While this is a hassle anytime, adding a cat to the equation transforms the merely annoying into an inscrutable Kafkian labyrinth of frustration. To get
a cat overseas, you need vaccines, vaccination records, implanted microchips, a time sensitive veterinarian checkup and a health certificate which is then overnight expressed to the State capitol and stamped with an official seal, import visas, several duplicate forms, pictures of passports and pet, a little luck, a lot of money, the horn of a unicorn, and a vial of the tears of the innocent. There were also the expected hours wasted on hold with airlines, unanswered emails, and tickets that had to be cancelled and rebooked simply to appease the petulant airline gods. The silver lining was that for inexplicable Covid reasons, the Thai quarantine protocol had mandated that visitors with pets had to quarantine on the island of Phuket rather than in Bangkok; this Brer Rabbit punishment would force us to fly to Phuket and spend a week on a tropical island instead of spending it trapped inside a Bangkok hotel.
Although exasperating, none of this was unexpected. This isnt our first rodeo with the cat. We have done this before, with several airlines, in several languages, on several continents. Bobo Tsunami was born behind the public library in Kansas City, Missouri in the winter of
2004. Since then, he has traveled from middle America to Chile to Ethiopia to NYC to Thailand, back to America, and now back to Thailand. He has survived a stick beating and met the cat whisperer, gone blind then miraculously recovered, terrified veterinarians irrespective of race, gender, or nationality, had a long and sordid romance with a stuffed monkey named Sweetheart, foiled Asiana Airlines best effort to strand him in JFK, and most importantly, repeatedly survived the ordeal of flying around the world in the belly of the airplane. Bobo is a survivor.
Once we get to the airport in Kansas City, Missouri, the American Airlines agent asks a few perfunctory cat questions, takes our money, and promptly forgets about the cat. That was obviously way too easy. It takes about two minutes for the other shoe to drop.
Pushing her glasses back, the frumpy middle aged American airlines agent focuses her profoundly on us, and sighs.
Yes sir, I can see this letter is from the Thai embassy. Yes, I agree that the embassy is the official representative of the government of Thailand. Yes, I see that the letter says a doctor certifying your
daughter is recovered from is valid for entry into Thailand. Yes, you do in fact have a letter from a doctor that says exactly this. However, MY system says we only accept a negative PCR test for entry into Thailand. Oh, you assumed American airlines wouldnt recognize the authority of the embassy of Thailand so you brought a negative PCR test anyway? Splendid. Sorry. You must have a P.C.R. test to travel. YOUR test says ‘molecular not ‘PCR. No sir, you cant write it on the test.
