VISAS
After a hectic few months of international travel I am now in a deliberate window free of international travel in order to sort out the necessary visas. My country does not allow secondary passports and so I have to carefully plan when I will get visas arranged in times that I do not need to use it. With my travel schedule and just a 3 month window before travel to each country to get a visa (other than places where I can get multi-visit visas and already have such), it is a delicate juggling act co-ordinating it all.
As regular readers of my trip reports may recall, I prefer to leave it to a specialist visa company to advise me of the requirements and manage the visas I need to get in advance. This saves me a lot of time and hassle, which can be considerable when you live in a country that has no official representation for many countries, or at least none that can issue visas and those that can are mostly in a different city.
I visited their offices and had a wee chat. They know me well. The lovely lady asked where I was off to this time, and I said "lot's of places - it is a bit complicated". She started printing out stuff for the first few countries I mentioned but then decided it was indeed complicated and they needed a more careful look at my itinerary.
"I've been working here for 15 years and have never seen an itinerary quite like this one" was the next comment
After more than an hour looking up stuff in their big book of visa requirements, various online databases and much scratching of heads, we had the visa requirements sorted ... except for a couple of countries. For those the expert said there was more than one interpretation, and I'd have to take my luck.
Just like some fare rules, some visa requirements are unclear in the treatment of multiple "and" and "or" conditions. Simply put, parts of my itinerary are so odd that the circumstances would not have been envisaged by those who write the rules.
As with my
RTW earlier in the year when I visited Kurdistan, I also have a visit to a place not yet recognised as a country by all other countries, and whose status changes by the week, which naturally also complicates the visa requirements. That one, however, is not my main concern as I write this post.