Underground, Overground: Wandering free

There is nothing better than having a brand new empty passport and immediately having to fill it up with visas. The sight of a visa in your passport is the promise of a trip to come, part of the excitement of preparation. However, not being in your home country and applying for visas can be surprisingly tricky.

The route we’re taking means going through 3 countries that require visas for Brits: China, Russian and Mongolia.

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I quickly got the Chinese visa out of the way by using a travel agent in the old quarter to do it for me. $40 sounded like a bargain when I considered everything I’d read about the hassle of pushing my way through a Vietnamese queuing system at the embassy in person.

The Mongolian embassy and visa consulate is off Kim Ma street on Pho Van Bao. It’s an area of town where a lot of embassies are to be found. Down a cute little side street near RMIT and the Nigerian and Pakistan embassy is a big house with a gate and the residence of the Mongolian ambassador. Helpfully outside the gate is a note in English giving you instructions: the consulate is open Tuesday and Thursdays, the cost of the Visa (depending on whether you’re a foreigner $30, or Vietnamese national $15) and a reminder to bring some photographs.

The morning I went there was one man on duty who invited me into what looked like his living room rather than an office and told me I could pick up my passport in a couple of days.

The preparation for the Russian visa was a mission in itself. For a regular one month tourist visa it’s required to have a tourist invitation. For around $30 there are a lot of online agencies in Russia that can arrange this for you. It is also a requirement of many Russian consulates that you apply for the visa in your home country. My mum and dad would be ok, applying in London and it was fortunate for me that I had a 6 month business visa for Vietnam as the consulate won’t accept foreign applications with Vietnamese tourist visas in their passport.

Expensively for me, the consulate in Hanoi will only accept the original tourist invitation voucher from Moscow (rather than a printed email), so $75 later I had a UPSed original document and trotted off to find the embassy.

The address given online is 191 La Thanh, which points to an impressive (if a bit lego looking) grey monumental construction. The actual visa section is round the corner, through a car park and to the left down a small alleyway. A small grey door, with no markings, leads into a garden and then you pass through a metal detector into a small waiting room. This is as much of the consulate that you are going to see. Due to the amount of chat on travel forums and websites about the difficulty of getting a Russian visa I was quite nervous that I hadn’t filled in my application correctly, got the wrong tourist invitation, asked for the wrong dates etc… and was expecting an interrogation as to why I was going. If I messed up the visa application, that was the entire trip kiboshed.

The staff though in the consulate couldn’t have been nicer. Sure they seemed to take a long time to check my documentation and my passport – looking for the long-term Vietnamese visa, and even though I’d totally forgotten to think about paying in dollars not VND and so hadn’t brought any money with me, they were friendly and helpful and really, really nice.

So a week later and $90 lighter (the cheapest option for a British passport apparently) I proudly have my Russian visa. Hassle? What hassle!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Trans Mongolian, Travel, Visas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.