Well, who would have thought.
The seemingly big hurdle of the visa for China out of the way and it’s down to the easy stuff. The visa stuff is always ‘a thing’ - almost all countries offer you an eVisa, which sounds really attractive. No queuing at the border immigration office, no having to make sure you’ve got the dollars. However, it’s quite different when you get down to it.
We’re now looking at places 3-6 months in advance. You can get your eVisa now, but it will have expired by the time you get there. They ask you your entry point, which we have an idea of, but what if we change our minds. Know what? if it’s available at the border let’s just do that. So, on to the easy ones.
USA: A dawdle, at least if you’ve not been to a heap of countries they don’t like, most notably Cuba.
Canada: They don’t seem to give hoot.
New Zealand: Och! Just show up.
Australia: Vanessa got the email granting her visa in under a minute, before she even got the email acknowledging her application. Me? 24 hours later…
Now there you go, who would have thought that getting kicked out for working without the appropriate visa 25 years ago would make all that difference. And after all those mangos I helped them get to market.
Might just be a glitch. The website is warning that there is scheduled maintenance, perhaps that’s it.
Anyway, our flights in and out of Australia are already booked. At the worst we’ll just have to part in Tokyo and meet up again in Santiago de Chile 3-4 months later. Just let’s put that to one side for now and organise Easter Island, Machu Picchu and The Galapagos.
Funnily enough, for Chile, Peru and Ecuador you do just turn up.
Photo by Photoholgic on Unsplash
