Visa Trauma N51 03.406, W4 03.040

So far with this trip, my main responsibility has been to research & organise our Visas. Initially i found this to be a very daunting prospect, but with the help of the relevant Lonely Planet guide for each country and the wonderful internet, things got a little easier.

As i write this we have managed to obtain visas for the following countries;

Mongolia
Kazakhstan
Syria
Kyrgyzstan


We are currently waiting on our passports to be returned from the Iranian embassy, at which point we will be able to get our 3 remaining ones, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan & the dreaded Russian multiple entry business visa. We plan on getting our Jordanian ones at the border crossing, which is quite routine.


We had thought that we would use a company such as Travcour to get the visas on our behalf as we live so far form London, but after toting up how much this would all come to we decided against it.
Most of the embassies have on line application forms and accept postal applications. The only times we have used outside help has been for a letter of invitation to Uzbekistan, and a letter of invitation to Russia.
If you are travelling to these countries as part of an organised tour then your travel company would arrange all this for you, but as independent travellers it gets a little more complicated. In effect we have had to buy an invitation from a company based in the respective places we wish to visit.
At times it has felt like an awful lot of hoops to jump through - almost as if they want to make it as difficult as possible for tourists to get in and explore these places, but if the preparation for this trip has taught me one thing, it's that Nothing Good Comes Easy!!
VB