We've got all the visa!

Yes, finally! From an admin point of view we are now all set to leave on our journey.We have now go all the required visa for our trip. And this was indeed not an easy task at all. Especially, if you are Australian and always travelling, like Boris. This means, that you cannot leave your passport at an embassy for long, because you need it for your travels. It further means, that your country apparently allies with the wrong nations, which makes you the citizen of a rogue state. Hence, you require official invitations from within the "Stans".  If you are Swiss, it's a bit more easy. But if you live in Laos on a "border run" visa, you also need your passport once a month to renew your visa for Laos. What a headache.

The first step in the whole visa process was planning the route roughly and determining at which border we would stand on what date. Then we looked into the visa types and application procedure. After many hours of research on the internet which resulted in different information from "you can get a visa on arrival" to "you need an official letter of invitation from some one living in the country", I inquired at the embassy of Kazakhstan (KAZ) and the consulate of Uzbekistan (UZB) in Bangkok, while transiting through Bangers. With the information  from there it seemed fairly straight forward, KAZ would need 3 days process, UZB 5 days from the date of submission of the visa application documents. So we all filled out the visa documents, and in early February I traveled to Bangers with all our passports (which is not something you should do, as we found out later) in order to stay there for a week and wait for the visas to get processed.

Well. After eight days, after running back and forth from consulate to embassy, and almost missing my flight back to Vientiane, I had to return to Laos with a 1-out-of-8 success rate. Ironically, the only visa I could pick up was the visa for Boris for UZB. All the other visas were not ready, nobody knows why. Luckily I met Manny in the queue at the Kazakh embassy, and could arrange that he would follow up the visa  process for us while staying another week in Thailand to get his own visa. Lessons learned from these two applications:

1) Never trust the information given at an embassy about how long it takes to get a visa processed.

2) Never declare a passport as "Passport" when using DHL, but but it into an envelope and declare as "important document". This safes you 4 days for sending it, as it will not lay around at some government office to get approval for sending by post.

3) Do not look left and right while going to the KAZ embassy and do not carry spare cash. The embassy is located on 43th floor of the Bangkok Gems Trading Tower. So you have make your way through numbers and numbers of small stores, selling Rubin, Tourmaline, my favorite blue Topaz, and  all kinds of other gem stones, lined up beautifully in the colors of the rainbow in different sizes and shapes. Very, very dangerous terrain (I should have told the guys at home the visa was a bit more expensive)....

 The China visa was quite a fast process to obtain in the end, as there is a Chinese embassy in Vientiane. And the embassy staff is so efficient, amazing. But of course this visa gave Horst a big headache to organize, once we had the official Chinese invitation, everything was easy. Finally, the last missing piece, the Kyrgyzstan visa could be organized with the help of Stanstours travel agency. And: We have now got the confirmation that it will not be a problem to travel through Tibet in May. Apparently the Chinese government will not close the whole area to tourists, despite expected "festivities" around the celebrations of the 60 years anniversary of Tibet as a Chinese province.