Brisbane, Australia

Who would have thought that it would be such a long-winded job to get Visas to visit Russia. Hasn’t anyone told the Russians that they are no longer a Communist country and they are supposed to be welcoming visitors (& their dollars) with open arms?

Because I don’t think the Russians have heard!!

As an Australian, you can have the choice of a single-entry Tourist Visa or a double-entry Tourist Visa. Do you want to enter Russia more than that? НЕТ (that’s “Nyet” in Cyrillic)! You can have a Visa for 30 days. Do you want to stay longer? НЕТ! But I want to stay for longer and visit more than once – then you have to look at a Business Visa. But what if you’re retired? НЕТ! What if we want to visit Russia after driving through Europe? You have to enter Russia within 90 days of the Visa being issued and the Visa will only be issued in the country of your nationality (ie Oz)!

Hmmm, back to the drawing board!

What about if we want to drive through Kazakhstan? Then you will have to send your Passport to Malaysia to get your Visa.

What about if we want to drive through Uzbekistan? Then you have to have a Tajikistan Visa first. How do we get a Visa for Tajikistan? That’s our secret and no-one is going to tell you!

What about if we want to drive through Turkmenistan? Then you have apply in person at the nearest Turkmenistani Embassy. I live in Brisbane – where is my nearest Turkmenistani Embassy? Sorry, there isn’t one in Australia.

Mongolia has suddenly become relatively easy – we can rock up to the Mongolian Consulate in Ulan Ude, have a passport photo, pay some money and then Voila!

But back to the Russian Visa…so, we’ve decided that we want to try and get a Business Visa. What do we have to do? First of all, we have to be employed! We have to get our employment and education history translated into Russian. We have to prove that we don’t have AIDS – mind you, we don’t have to do that as a Tourist! And we can only apply a short time before leaving for Russia, in fact, after our car has left and AGES after we bought our tickets!

Next we have to find someone who will help us to get a Letter of Invitation. You can’t just apply and say you want to go to Russia. Noooo – first you have to be invited to visit Russia! But I don’t know anyone in Russia to invite me? I was gob-smacked when I found out that there are companies in Russia whose only job is to issue a Letter of Invitation to some complete stranger who wants to visit Russia. Amazing!!

We applied for our Letter of Invitation and Hallelujah, we got one but we don’t get to see this all-important Letter of Invitation. We are just told the name of the inviting company and the number of the Letter of Invitation because we need this information for our Visa applications.

So we now have our Letter of Invitation (ok, so the number), the results of our AIDS test (thankfully Negative), our translated resumes. Now it’s time to apply for the Visas. So, you have to go on-line and fill in the form on-line, print it out, sign the form and post to the Russian Embassy with all the required supporting documentation and a Money Order of mega-bucks.

Damn, we’re at the farm and don’t have a good internet connection. So we rang our friends Fay & Eberhard Helwig at Das Helwig Haus and asked if we could come around and use their computer and internet. Yes, of course you can.

Now, when I’m sitting at the computer, typing in the information asked, I’m flying blind because you can’t print out a blank form to work out what information you need. So when I got to the bit where I had to list every country visited in the past 10 years and the date that we arrived in each country!! Thankfully I had my passport with me, but that only gave me the information since 2009. Well, that’s all they were going to get!

But the trick is – don’t take too long filling in the form because there is a time-out factor and if the form times-out before you finish, then you lose everything you’ve typed in and have to go back to Square One, again!

In the end, after 3 attempts with my Visa Application and 4 attempts with Nick’s Visa Application, we got our applications printed out and ready for posting.

I have to say that we received wonderful support from the staff at Passport Travel (www.travelcentre.com.au) in Melbourne and have to say a HUGE thank you to Brent and Marie for their help and especially to Marie for her efforts with our translations and also running interference with the Russian Embassy.

The FINAL outcome was that Visa Applications were posted on 26^th February and we got our Passports back with our wonderful 12-month Multiple-Entry Business Visas on 5^th March, 12 days before our departure date of 17^th March! Phew!! And so now we are ready to go!