Posts for category visas

Russia plays a key role in our planned journey across Asia. Not only is it the starting point, but it will also turn out to be one of the longest legs on our journey. It is also the only country that we have planned to enter twice (the second time between Mongolia and Kazakstan), and finally it also our escape route. In the event that we cannot get a visa for Iran (or Turkmenistan) we will re-enter Russia from Kazakstan, travel north of the Caspian and catch a ferry from Russia‘s black sea coast to Turkey. Thus getting a useful Russian visa seemed of crucial importance; our goal was a 1 year multiple entry visa.

We had a good experience shipping our expedition truck (motor home) from the US port of Everett to the Russian port of Vladivostok. But this did not come about without a good bit of research and probably a good bit of luck.

Our second visa while enroute. Our biggest difficulties with this visa were finding the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Ulaanbaatar, and having our watches set to the correct Ulaanbaatar time. Because of this latter mistake we spent 4 hours wandering around town waiting for the Embassy to open again so we could submit our applications.

Mongolia represented the first of a long list of countries that we had/have to get visas for while enroute. Fortunately, as it turned out this one was pretty simple. It also turned out that we could probably have obtained Mongolian visas before departing had we been a little more organized.

From the earliest days of research for this trip it was evident that visas would be an issue both in terms of arranging the timing so that consecutive countries matched up on entry and exit dates and in terms of the process. A complicating factor was that we would have to get many of the visas while in transit as it was not possible because of timing issues to get all visas in advance of starting the journey.