Three and a half hours! That’s how long it took to cross the Namibian border, whereas it only took about 45mins to leave South Africa. 

When we are planning to travel, one of the things that we do, or Nick does, is to research the need for Visas and if they are required, how to apply. Do you apply when you land in country, or do you need an eVisa that you have to apply for beforehand? Do you need to get to an Embassy for an interview? And what will it cost?

For this trip, we looked at the incoming European ETAIS, as well as visa requirements for South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Just in case, he also checked Zambia. 

For South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe & Zambia, they are all apply on arrival, but for Namibia, it was very confusing. It talked about apply on arrival and pre-approval, but which did we need? We finally pinned it down to one simple difference – if you are coming into Namibia by either air or sea, then you can apply on arrival, but if you are entering across a land border, then you had to apply for pre-approval. And we were crossing at a land border.

We had to wait to get our tickets before we could apply for the visas and then, when we had all the details required, we couldn’t get onto the website! It kept on timing-out, with the message of “too slow” and “unable to connect”.

MJ rang the Namibian Consulate in Sydney, who confirmed that we had to go through the pre-approval process but assured us that the website was working fine! We persisted, trying it on both Mac and Windows computers but all to no avail. 

We finally rang our travel agent who recommended that we use a Visa Agent. He recommended one to us and gave us the prices – it turned out that we would have to pay about $120 extra for them to take on the hassle… and this seemed the best option, particularly as we were only days from our departure date. 

About 5 days after we left Australia, we got an email from Gerard who passed on the message that the Namibian Visa website had been down for 14 days! And that covered the time that we had been trying to get on-line!!

Finally, we were advised that we had been granted Pre-Approval for our Visas, we were advised to print out the eVISAs as the border would require a hard copy, so we printed them out and finally we were ready for the border. 

Fast forward to meeting the rest of the people on our tour – we discovered that we were the only ones who had applied for and received Pre-Approval. So that meant that there were 8 people who didn’t have the necessary paperwork to enter Namibia. What would happen when we got to the border?

And now we are at the border. We left South Africa after going through Immigration, Customs and a Police Check – to make sure that there were no unpaid bills or anything. Then we hopped back onto our truck and headed to the Namibian side of things. 

I’m not sure if it was extra slow because it was a Sunday but there was a huge queue of people waiting and only 2 officers to process the applications. And one of those officers only had 3 speeds – half-speed, quarter-speed and stop! We had to stand in line as there were no seats & this didn’t do any favours for Nick’s foot which has been giving him trouble. 

Finally, we got to the front of the line, ok so I got to the front of the line after about 2 hours (Nick had retired to rest his sore foot), and finally we had the precious stamps and Visas in our passports, so we were right to go!

But no! We had to wait for the rest of our tour members! They all planned on applying and paying for their Visas at the border. And It turned out that they could! They had been told by our Guide to have the right about of cash (R1600) and they had filled out their forms. 

Then they were told that they to go to the office on the other side (Leaving Namibia) to make the payment but the officer in the other office wouldn’t accept the money, he said that payment had to be made by Credit Card and, unfortunately, one of the Tour Group got a bit upset and assertive and put the Immigration Officer off-side. So then he was refusing to process anyone’s application!

After much quiet talking by our Tour Guide, and getting the boss-lady involved, it was all finally resolved, we all had our Visas and we were finally sorting down on the bus, when…

They wanted to do a closer inspection of the Truck, in fact they wanted to put the truck through a BIG scanner to check that we weren’t smuggling in anything that was on the prohibited list. Apparently there is Foot & Mouth disease in South Africa and both Namibia and Botswana have banned all dairy and meat products from coming over the border. 

Fortunately, our driver and Tour Guide were too responsible to be caught doing anything illegal and we were finally on our way to our first night Namibia, which was only a short distance as we were staying in a camp on the Orange River, which forms the border between South Africa and Namibia. 

So folks remember some important tips when planning a border crossing:

• If necessary, pre-apply for your Visa as it will save a lot of time, and
• remember, the Immigration Officer has all the power so don’t antagonize him!