Eventually, I decided to avoid the Iran due to the impending elections and the uncertainty with regard to the Iran-Israel/USA conflict. These are the paper maps that cover my trip:
But then almost everything
that can go wrong went wrong so far:
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| Nepal, Northeast India, Pakistan, West China, Kazakhstan, West Russia, the Baltic |
It all started when
I realized that my passport doesn't have enough blank pages for all the visa of
the various countries I plan to ride through. That was shortly after my stay on
Palawan, Philippines, just when I intended to start applying for visa. I was
hoping there's the option to attach additional pages to the German passport.
Unfortunately, this is not the case; you have to apply for a new one. The other
option would have been to apply for a temporary one. The advantages are:
cheaper and faster than a new one; disadvantage: only 9 pages. So I started
calculating: Nepal, India, Pakistan, China, Kazakhstan, Russia; at least one
page for each country's visa sticker. So only 2 left for their stamps. Some
countries already state in their information regarding visa application that
there must be at least 2 blank pages left. I definitely want to avoid any
additional, unnecessary issues at boarders, because the process itself is quite
troublesome and time consuming already. Thus, I decided to apply for a new
passport; express & big (more pages). It took 3 weeks and cost around 200
€. Much more , of course, than getting it in Germany because they add charges
like "Unzuständigkeitsgebühr". Well, that reduced the time for the
visa hunt to 3 weeks.
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| Old, invalid passport (left) and new one (right), German embassy in Singapore. |
In addition, I had
booked a flight to Saigon/Ho Chi Min City just about the same day, my new
passport was supposed to arrive. If I were lucky, my new passport would have
arrived just one day before my departure. Technically, I was lucky, but the
German embassy in Singapore still relies on snail mail to inform you about the
arrival of your new passport. Thus, I could only miss my flight and book
another one to get my new passport or still use my old one. Due to the short
amount of time left, I thought I should try to get at least one visa in
Vietnam. Therefore, I picked up my passport on the next day and flew to Saigon
two days later than scheduled. In Vietnam, however, I wasn't successful in
applying for the Indian (processing time of 5 working days would have exceeded
my stay) nor for the Chinese (they wanted to see a letter of invitation from
the travel agency).
Back in Singapore I
tried the High Commission of Pakistan next: "Where is your flight
ticket?" "I'll travel overland." "Why do you want to go to
Pakistan?" "Because I heard it's an interesting country and it's on
the way back to Germany." "Where is your Indian and Chinese
visa?" "Well, I'll get the Indian visa in Nepal and for the Chinese
visa I'm still waiting for the documents from the travel agency."
"OK, please have a seat in the waiting room, we will check your
application." 10-15 min later: "Your application is OK, you just need
a letter of invitation from a friend in Pakistan." (side note: I called
them a couple of weeks ago and asked what documents I need to bring. I was
told, a booking confirmation for the hotel is enough.) Luckily, the student
body at NUS is quite divers so it didn't take long to find a Pakistani who is
willing to do me a big favor. Her name is Gulmina and her father is ambassador
of Pakistan - not it Singapore though - so she actually knows some of the
people at the embassy. Therefore, I believe my second attempt beginning next
week will have good chances to succeed.
Meanwhile, I
received the documents from the Chinese
travel agency via email. Just in time before my flight to Bangkok (BKK), Thailand,
where I have to organize the air freight of my motorbike. Chinese embassies
offer the service of urgent visa application so that you can collect the visa
on the next day (almost double the price than normal). I was of good cheer
because I had photocopies of all documents and thought it would be easy going. Well, I was
wrong. End of the story: I couldn't get the visa before my flight to BKK. They
had doubts about the validity of the letter of invitation. The balance so far:
2 weeks of visa hunt, 4 embassies, no visa.
Now I'm in Thailand
to organize the shipment of my motorbike to Kathmandu (KTM), Nepal. One problem
is already put in place: my temporary import permit expired 2 months ago. I
knew it will be the case and I consciously let it happen as I got the information
that it is not a very big issue if you keep it below six months. There are
different rumors about how much the fine is, but all figures were cheaper than
2 return flights SIN-BKK which would have been necessary for the extension of
the permit. I'll go to extend/re-apply for it at the customs headquarter in
Bangkok tomorrow; supported by Mr. Thira's logistics agency Excel Transport
that I entitled to send my motorbike to KTM. Let's see how it goes…
