Ready for a little admin hell?
When escaping from a normal life to become a traveller, you are excited that you will be moving away from the day-to-day drudge and are now entering a care-free existence. Then reality strikes in the form of visa applications.
It can be enough to dampen any travel plans, especially as South African passport holders, as the places you can travel to without a visa are very limited.
It is really complicated
We are already welcome in some countries, but even this is not straightforward. We have a visa for the US but the visa appears in old passports that we will have to carry with us (as well as our marriage certificate as it was issued in Lauren's maiden name). Then we have a visa for Australia but it does not appear in our passport - we simply have a letter from the Australian government. Another difficult one to explain to a customs official who wants to see a visa for your end destination.
You normally need to prove that you have no intention of staying permanently in a country when applying for a visa. This includes a flight ticket back to you home country and a permanent residential address and job. But with an extended vacation that will shape itself along the way, you don’t want to buy that ticket home yet, and you have let go of most of the things tying you down to one home. The authorities don’t seem to like that and don’t embrace the lack of commitment and conformity that you aspire to achieve.
Why so nervous?
Another strange thing is that we are simple travellers wanting to see and learn as much as possible from other cultures. We're not some international criminal masterminds, avoiding the authorities and living a double-life. In fact, we can be considered law abiding and boringly uninteresting rule-following individuals. Yet, we get so nervous when dealing with the embassies - ensuring all the paperwork is correct, nothing has been overlooked, and that all the information submitted is aligned and giving the same version of the truth.
All this admin causes sleepless nights, hours of pouring over the same paperwork, checking and re-checking. Just when you think you are getting this process nailed, the next application requires something completely different with a different version of your passport photo. No matter how prepared you are, or how many times you have done it before, you always feel like you are running the visa application gauntlet.
Penance due?
Perhaps the admin hell of visa applications is the penance you have to pay to live an extraordinary life filled with travel. When life becomes a vacation, maybe visa applications are there to remind you of the real world.
It can be enough to dampen any travel plans, especially as South African passport holders, as the places you can travel to without a visa are very limited.
It is really complicated
We are already welcome in some countries, but even this is not straightforward. We have a visa for the US but the visa appears in old passports that we will have to carry with us (as well as our marriage certificate as it was issued in Lauren's maiden name). Then we have a visa for Australia but it does not appear in our passport - we simply have a letter from the Australian government. Another difficult one to explain to a customs official who wants to see a visa for your end destination.
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| A special kind of admin hell (Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/writing-write-person-paperwork-828911/) |
Why so nervous?
Another strange thing is that we are simple travellers wanting to see and learn as much as possible from other cultures. We're not some international criminal masterminds, avoiding the authorities and living a double-life. In fact, we can be considered law abiding and boringly uninteresting rule-following individuals. Yet, we get so nervous when dealing with the embassies - ensuring all the paperwork is correct, nothing has been overlooked, and that all the information submitted is aligned and giving the same version of the truth.
All this admin causes sleepless nights, hours of pouring over the same paperwork, checking and re-checking. Just when you think you are getting this process nailed, the next application requires something completely different with a different version of your passport photo. No matter how prepared you are, or how many times you have done it before, you always feel like you are running the visa application gauntlet.
Penance due?
Perhaps the admin hell of visa applications is the penance you have to pay to live an extraordinary life filled with travel. When life becomes a vacation, maybe visa applications are there to remind you of the real world.
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