Visas

One of the vagaries of travel is tying together all the loose ends. The easy part is finding flights, hotels, rental cars. The hard part is working with several countries regarding ingress and egress, and that means visa requirements. In January we will be cruztalking on a cruise that makes several stops in China. This past week I have been working on the visa requirements for entry into China. My first challenge was to find a provider that was not going to ask a mint for the service. I found prices vary from $200 to $500 per visa! I asked my travel agent, which provider she recommended and used that service at about $200/visa.

Getting a visa can be a big deal or it can be a piece of cake. For example, when you go to Turkey, you need a visa, but all you have to do when you land in Istanbul is find the line that says “visa” and pay $20 American, and you get the visa.

Egypt has an interesting visa requirement. You can go directly to an Egyptian Consulate in the States and apply for a visa and for a small fee; they will affix it to your passport. You may also go through one of the many visa document providers that exist, both on and offline, and for a larger fee, they will affix it to your passport. OR, you could wait until you get to Cairo. At that point, find the queue that says “visa,” line up and pay $15 for a single entry or $25 for a double entry visa. They will give you a pretty stamp and you will have to figure out how to glue it in your passport.

If you are thinking of going to Brazil for the 2016 Olympics, then you will need a visa. You will have to go through a visa provider, but the visa is good for 5 years providing you use the visa within 60 days after it has been purchased. The same is true if you are going to Russia. The Russian visa takes up a whole page in your passport, and it has your name printed in Russian characters, which is fun to look at.

If you go through a visa provider, you will have to fill out a questionnaire or application form. While all the questionnaires are similar in that they want your name, date and place of birth, passport number, employer, etc. Some countries want detailed information on items you have long forgotten. That was the case with a Russian visa application. It was about 10 pages long, with each line written in Russian (i.e., Cyrillic) and English.

When all is said and done, filling out a visa application form is never easy. I strive to give correct information, but sometimes, I just don’t remember or I cannot figure out what they want. For example, I am retired. So when a form asks for my employer I state “retired.” That’s fine for most countries, but the Chinese visa form still wants to know from where I retired. Then they ask, when did I retire? Do they want the exact day or the year? I’ve learned that if the questionnaire says YY-MM-DD, they want the exact date. If that is not indicated, then a year will do.

Given the above, I filled out the forms for the Chinese Visa today. It took me 3 days of gathering to get all the information. In addition to a 2-page questionnaire that is written in both Chinese and English, I needed a current original passport photo, (do not send photos that I have copied and saved to my computer!) I needed a complete itinerary and my flight and cruise schedule for the entire time we are going to be gone. If I had copies of my e-tickets and my cruise vouchers that would suffice. Lastly, I have to send them my passports that have at least 4 empty pages, not including pages 20-24, which are never used for visas. I think the package is squared away. Tomorrow I’ll send it Priority Mail to the SF office of the visa provider, and, if I completed the form correctly and sent in all the right stuff, they tell me that I should have my visas and passports back in 4 days. I hope so. I do not like having my passports out of my hands for that long and then to put them through the mail system to boot.

On the up side, we will be traveling through seven countries. China is the only country that needs a visa. Thank goodness for that! I would not like to go through a similar process for each of them.

Earlier this year I worked on getting International Driver's Licenses. It was a piece of cake: passport photos, copy of US Driver's License, and $15. It would be nice if visas were that easy!