The duration of the permitted visit to Malaysia for a Canadian is 90 days. After your 90 days are up, you have to do something that is actually quite simple, and enjoyable. You have to leave the country for three days, and when you return, your visa has another 90 days on it. I discovered that after several times of doing this, immigration will say, "Hey, c'mon, this is not right. You can't keep doing this". I have really enjoyed my visa runs though.
On the first visa run, we went to Singapore, which actually used to be a part of Malaysia. It is an island and it is very Americanized. Their currency is at par with the American dollar, and because I was in Southeast Asia, I spent like I was still in Malaysia. To stay in a grubby hotel in "Little India" for four days, drove me - no, flew me to the "poor house". We weren't really on a vacation though, we were simply on a visa run. We didn't do anything like tourists should do, we just walked around like locals.
On my next visa run, we went to Hatyai, Thailand. We took a twelve hour train there, and now, like long flights, I am sick of long train rides. In Thailand, the currency rate is much more comparable to Malaysia, but we stayed in an even cheaper place. Again, we treated this like a visa run, and not a vacation, so the only touristy thing we did was take a recreational ride on a tuktuk. It may actually be called a tuk tuk. One word or two though, it is just a tiny truck where you sit in the back in a roofed pick up bed, with bench seating.
My next visa run was a vacation. We went to Bali, Indonesia, and loved it. We were in a nice hotel,a walk from the beach, and we ate very well. On our first night we were wondering where we could go to eat, and the hotel manager was trying to help us with suggestions. He then remembered there is a little family restaurant right in the same parking lot as the hotel. We ended up going there every day we were in Bali. The owners were very courteous to us, and even gave a departing gift of their local chili peppers that we told her we were quite fond of.
So thanks to my visa runs, I have seen more of Southeast Asia than I have seen of Canada, where I am from.
