Preparations for the trip part 1 – Indian Visa

Like any smart man should do I’m leaving most of the details of preparation to my wife. I figured that if I was organizing the trip I’d end up forgetting all the things that one might find necessary when traveling in some of the coldest and highest places in the world. She’s got the itinerary planned, marked in notebook and iCal, tickets are booked, travel insurance and visas sorted out and last week she took me to get vaccinated against all the bugs we might encounter out there in the third world.

First thing on the list: the necessary paperwork. Getting the Indian Visa is a good introduction to the bureaucratic machine that apparently awaits us. It started of pretty easy, I googled “India Visa” and the first link was in.vfsglobal.co.uk which turned out to be the company that was chosen by Indian embassy to handle all visa applications.

We followed the easy enough instructions, filled out the forms and got the photos ready. Since we had to redo the form here are few tips for you: The referrals in your own country cannot be people who live on the same address – don’t know why but they made us change that. You will need a referral (where are you staying) in India which is sort of useless when a large number of travelers are backpackers who are going on their own and traveling through 20 different places just like we’re planning to do so I googled the Yoga Centre where we’re planning to visit in March next year and put their address on there and it was accepted. Funny enough one line in the address was “near the taxi stand” – incredible India.

Since we’re planning to stay in the region for 8 months we applied for the 12 month tourist visa using one of the options on the VF website. It was only £15 more. Also we were applying for the visa with Canadian passports in the UK and the website informed us that it would take 10 days extra for processing so we decided to deliver the passports to the nearest VF office to speed up the procedure.

The office in Manchester involves two desks in a warehouse like setting, two friendly young people and no computers. After we sorted out the reference issues (see above) we were told that we couldn’t apply for the 12-month visa!! The VF website didn’t say anything about this and they accepted our payment for the 12-month visa but now we were being told by a friendly young fellow behind a desk with no computer in an empty warehouse-like setting that we could only apply for the 6 month visa as the first timers. To add to the confusion, a traveler who was also in the office at the time showed us his passport which had a 12 month visa and he said he got the 12 month permit as his first visa. So we left our passports there, with the 12 month application, hoping for the best.

Approximately 2 weeks later we received our passports back with…you guessed right…6 month visa only….and to make matters worse – the visa is valid from the date of issue which is a month before our departure date!

Here comes my “what grinds my gears” moment. You are not supposed to book your tickets before you get your visa and your visa is valid from the date of issue. If you ever booked flights you know they get more expensive closer to the date so if you want to book your tickets a month in advance and save some money you are wasting a month of your visa.

The lack of common sense at high levels of government always fascinates me – are they doing it on purpose or are they really that daft?

Anyway – we have the visas that will expire 5 months into our 8-month trip so the plan is to waste a big chunk of our budget and head to Katmandu in January and reapply for a visa there in the Indian consulate. Apparently that is a questionable task in its own but more update on that later.