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.
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