There were many moments today when we thoughts that last nights anticipatory celebration (of getting our last visa) was premature. We arrived at the entrance to the Uzbek Embasy about 9:50am well in time for the 10:00am appointment that was made for us with the Uzbek Embassy by Celestial Mountain Tours earlier in the week. As we waited a bit of a crowd assembled and it became clear that the Embassy made 10:00am appointments with a significant number of people. Just after 10:00 a young landy came out onto the steps and in a very quiet voice started reading out names; these were the people who the embassy had recorded as having appointments. You guessed it our names were not on the list. We were not the only ones in this position. Seems like the Uzbekistan Embassy is not very good at keeping lists
So we set off for the office of Celestial Mountain Tours at a fast clip, where a young lady named Zamira rang the Uzbek Embassy on our behalf and got a reassurance that if we had a letter of invitation we could return to the Embassy and we would be "taken care of".
Back at the Embassy door there was quite a crowd waiting on the footpath (side walk) for their turn to enter the Embassy. Nina and I waited with the group for a while but could not figure out what was going on; so in desperation we called Celestial Mountain Tours and asked if they could send us a translator (they had previously offered to do so) to help us through the muddle. Within 20 minutes Elizabeth (from Celestial Montain Tours) arrived. Talking to the others waiting with us (in Russian) it became clear that people were just taking their turn to enter; so we settled down to wait.
The young women ahead of us in the line was also in the position of having telephoned earlier in the week for an appointment but having been told "not on the list" at 10:00am this morning. When she came out from her turn having had her application accepted and a visa issued we felt somewhat reassured that maybe we would also get our visas today.
However we had an additional complexity that was about to raises its head. When Stantours processed our request for a Uzbek letter of invitation (LOI) they put the wrong dates on the invitation and I did not catch this mistake. When I pointed this out to them after the official invitation was issued they said "not to worry; it won't be a problem just make sure that they use the dates on the application form not on the LOI". We were about to test that advice.
It took the Uzbek visa officer all of 10 seconds to see the discrepancy in dates between our applications and the invitation letter. I am sure had we been by ourselves he would have simply sent us away. But our translator Elizabeth gave him our explanation and generally presented our case. We could not understand the exchange but it was clear that the Uzbek officer was not happy with the discrepancy in the dates but in the end he agreed to give us the visa for the dates that we wanted. After this was all over we learned from Elizabeth that at one point the officer said "tell these people that it is not easy to get a visa to their country so why do they think it should be easy to get a visa to Uzbekistan" - and we would have to admit that he had a point.
So with the ordeal over, we now have all the visa we will require to get to Turkey and then Europe.
We walked with Elizabeth back to the office of Celestial Mountains Tours, thanked everyone there who had helped us.
Our advice to others seeking to get a Uzbek visa in Bishkek. The Embassy visa process is chaotic. You will almost certainly need help from someone that speaks Russian; to make the necessary appointment, work out how to get through the crowd at the Embassy entrance and make sure all your paper work is correct.