Travel bureaucracy: a nightmare
Some stats: 4 friends. 7 visas to be obtained. 2 weeks to go before departure. 7 months abroad!
6 visits to the India visa centre. 3 visits to the chinese centre. 1 lost receipt - crucial. 1 lost passport photo - crucial. £350.
Some observations:
- both China and India now outsource their visa applications and collections to a private company. Yes, the irony of India outsourcing something - to the UK! - is staggering (even more so when the Indian IT system crashes). Yes, this just adds an extra layer of crap to deal with, and delays on your application. You submit at the centre, they take their cut (check these: China imposes a £30 visa fee, the contractor then charges a £30 service fee on top of that!), they send it to the embassy, they receive it from the embassy, they give you the visa. Is that service really necessary? should it cost as much as the Visa itself? It’s small comfort that my government charges foreigners even more for their visas!
- the Indian visa centre smells of fart and is terribly overcrowded. Fill in your forms and pay online, from the comfort of your own home, and book an appointment. Then photoshop the appointment letter to show whatever date and time suits *you* - wave it in the bouncer’s face when you get there and he’ll print you off a good number. The baaaad numbers put you in the ‘no appointment’ queue - and instead of waiting 30 minutes, you’ll be kept waiting up to 2 hours. So avoid it - Photoshop!
- if you’re like me - submitting Visa applications on behalf of friends from around the country, and like me, you happen to lose their passport photo with no way of getting another in time - fake it. This wasn’t a great job (those watermarks are there for a reason!), but printed out on printer paper, it convinced the Communist Government of China. Before and after:
- processing times are usually 3 days. Avoid the Chinese express services if you can, they’re bloody expensive! Note, the Indian visa service doesn’t offer an express service. Plan ahead!
- extra tips: if you have a non-UK passport, the Indians need to see a proof of UK residence from over 12 months ago. The Chinese don’t, but for UK citizens and aliens alike, they need to see flight bookings to China and hotel bookings for your first few nights in China. I had to edit the email sent by the hotel to add my name and a co-traveller’s, before printing it out and submitting. The Chinese visa centre has 2 computers with free Internet access and free colour printing - invaluable!
- scan everything. I cannot stress how important a tip this is. Scan all the receipts you get for passports, scan the passports, the visas, everything. I lost the receipt for my passport and that of a friend - the Chinese would absolutely not have bent the rules and given his passport back to me without him being there in person, without a great deal of charm and printouts of his and my passport scans.
Related:
- Quickie
- Quick update - I’ve only just pushed the wrap-up of our tour to China to the blog (here) but since China we’ve spent 2 weeks in Japan, just under a fortnight in Bangkok and the northern rainforested and silver-sand-ed Thai island of Koh Chang, and are currently doing an extended visa run into Cambodia, via the Tomb Raider-featured temples of Angkor. We’re not in the region for long enough to get lost in this curious country or the rest of the region (Laos and Vietnam appeal, but will be left un-bothered by us), and we’ll be diving back into Thailand very soon. Love to all, P Bookmark/Share: sociallist_28ac5fcf_url = 'http://www.overthecounterculture.com/2008/travel-bureaucracy-a-nightmare/'; sociallist_28ac5fcf_title = 'Travel bureaucracy: a nightmare'; sociallist_28ac5fcf_text = ''; sociallist_28ac5fcf_tags = ''; ...
- A-nyhao!
- Bad pun, I know. Nihao y’all. It seems we’ve been enjoying our Chinese leg so much, blogging about it has taken a dramatic back seat - time for a little update. After a long, empty flight (stretched out on rows of seats we had to ourselves) via misty Hong Kong we landed in Beijing just as the sun was setting. The modernity and cleanliness of Beijing airport left us stunned & excited - and heralded the stark contrast between China and India, which we had greatly underestimated. The immediate difference is in wealth - Beijing’s streets are awash with pretty women, sparkling Audi’s, glittering skyscrapers, highly fashionable clothes shops, hairdressers (ugh) and shopping malls (ugh^2). The 2008 Olympics still echo everywhere - products proudly proclaim their endorsements, posters still line the streets, public transport is efficient and obsessively clean, the mascots are still all over the state-run TV programmes, and security is tight and well-drilled at all the recently renovated tourist spots (in a few cases over-renovated, losing some of the authenticity that’s so vital to the enjoyment of a visit to an ancient relic of China’s immense cultural baggage - though it does make for nice photos!). There’s no...
- China wrap-up
- Stats: Time spent in China: 30 days Spending whilst in China: £570 (£18/day) Photos added to album: 500 (maxed out Google’s limit!) Stops: Beijing (the whole 9 yards - vibrant, friendly, fantastic treasures, cool art scene, fantastic eating, thoroughly modern and efficient post-Olympics infrastructure; shame about the air pollution that all typically deprives it of blue skies) Zhengzhou (a mallrat hell hole with non-English-speaking locals largely unreceptive to foreigners, pricey electronics superstores, ugly signage and dilapidated concrete housing) Xi’an (lovely open city with great eating, a lively Muslim Quarter, the tedious Terracotta Army, great trekking to nearby sacred mountains, warm people and good nightlife) Nanjing (a buzzing but not altogether pleasant city, home to the gut-twining Nanjing Massacre memorial and museum Suzhou (relaxed, open, ever so pleasant canal-veined town home to preposterously manicured, finicky Chinese gardens copied all around the world) Shanghai (a busy, charmless metropolis too caught up in its affairs to offer a backpacker much - but after the sun sets, blessed with great nightlife, though you have to seek it out) It may be a post-Olympics afterglow, we felt very welcome indeed (and not for our money!), and were surprised by how much curiosity awe were generating;...
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