Tag Archives: visa

Have visa, will panic

Admin, Adventures, Travelling in Europe, ,

I like travel well-planned, long-anticipated travel. I’m not particularly good at spontaneous. More than that, I find the build up, the waiting, the anticipation a wonderful part of the process. I’m already starting to plan a trip with a friend in Spring of 2015. So the last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind. No, tornado would be a better term.

A last-minute decision (both internally and from the people funding the trip) about attendance at a conference is great. At least, it’s great in theory. It’s a little more stressful if the conference is in Europe and you’re travelling on a South African passport. The colleague I’ll be travelling with has a US passport, as well as an EU one. I’m jealous. The thing that probably frustrates me most about South Africa is that we need visas for so many places. Perhaps not a frustration with South Africa as much as a frustration with the whole system. Until this probably can be solved, it’s visas required, so I headed off to the Netherlands consulate in Durban. According to reliable information, from friends who have tried it and write ups on travel blogs to the consulate website itself, you should apply for a Schengen visa at least three weeks before you travel. I had ten days. Cutting it fine. And so very far from the long, gentle build up to travel that I prefer.

The absolute minimum time the visa would take to come through was five working days. There was nothing I could do about it in the meantime. Luckily for me, I had little time to worry about it. Things at work have been crazy. At the beginning of this year, I had a seriously, almost overwhelmingly, stressful January. At the end of January, I breathed a sigh of relief and looked forward to things calming down. They didn’t. And since August, they’ve just gotten more and more chaotic. This week they ramped up to a whole new level of ridiculous.

And then, on Wednesday, I went back to the consulate, quite ready to be told that my application had been too late. In fact, hoping in a way that it wouldn’t come through so that I could take a few days to breathe. Instead, I was given a visa for longer than I’d originally expected. This is great. I know: it’s a great opportunity. But just thinking about it made me tired. The urge to travel overcame the exhaustion and I changed my ticket and arranged leave and rearranged my life to have at least a few extra days to explore Europe. Europe. This is my first trip to Europe. The shadow over so much of the history of my country, of Africa, of my heritage. I’m still not sure how I feel about Europe. I hope I can make the time to figure it out. I feel like it is important.

In the last couple of days, stress levels remained at peak, so that by Friday afternoon I still hadn’t done anything about planning the non-business part of my trip. In between stressing about work, I managed to find a few moments to panic about the fact that I needed to do something about bookings or plans or something. But there just wasn’t time. This is why I like long periods of planning and thinking and learning something about the place I’m going. Not this time. Instead, panic. Have visa, will panic.

I’m less stressed about it now. I’m heading up to Johannesburg today (Saturday). That means I have a whole Saturday night to finish all the work and finally make plans. Or perhaps it’s just because the packing – my least favourite part of travel – is done. I’m even beginning to get a little bit excited. Just a trip to Johannesburg, a weekend, high-stress public events and a particularly long Monday to go before I get to travel again.

A month and four days

Admin, Travelling in Africa, , ,

In a little over a month, I fly to Uganda for three weeks of adventuring in central Africa. I start the malaria meds today (I also have another trip in between).

I’ve reached that stage of cautious excitement – almost really believing that it might actually happen but trying not to get too attached to the idea in case it falls through and we’re all disappointed.

I want to go now. For a while there, I was really uncertain. I’m still nervous of what we’ll find there but I have no doubt – assuming the last few bits fall into place – that it will be the trip of a lifetime and one we will never forget. In a good way, I hope.

So each day is a day of hope and nerves, waiting for things to come together. This week is visa week. Perhaps the most nerve-wrecking for a while. Particularly because I fly to Zambia next Sunday, so things really need to work out on time.

I’m nervous and excited and hopeful and scared, but I’m not frustrated. This bit – when it looks like it might just work out and you know if it does it’ll blow your mind – this is anticipation of wonder.

Anticipation

Admin, Travel,

In a conversation not long ago, we chatted about how much of an agony anticipation can actually be. The idea of an exciting, joyous, happy-making future event is great. Or at least, it sounds great. But when the future-event is not certain (or – worse – is less certain than you think) and when the time-frame is not definite, it can get terribly frustrating and even a little depressing. It also makes you cynical. I have become cynical. After many disasters and disappointments, I’m not at all convinced that this trip will actually happen.

Perhaps in direct response to this – Murphy’s law and all – things actually appear to have worked out. By this I mean that I appear to be all set to leave the country.  After months of waiting and bureaucratic hoop-jumping, things have suddenly fallen into place. It seems.

The last step was applying for my visa at the South Korean consulate. This is really a follow-up step. The process starts (the visa process, I mean – the whole process starts with the SA bureaucracy) when you send all your precious documents (degree, criminal record check, etc.) to the school in Korea. They then submit your paperwork and – assuming you’re not a terrible criminal and haven’t lied about having a degree – get a visa issuance number, which they then send to you. This is perhaps why the process of applying for a visa in Pretoria (at the South Korean consulate) is so peculiarly painless and unbureaucratic – because the initial work has been done already.

Whatever the reason, this last little bit of the process of trying to leave the country has definitely been the least painful of the lot. In fact, it has been very pleasant. Simple, efficient, quick. The fact that this is sufficiently foreign to have me suspicious is probably an indictment on the poor service from SA’s bureaucracy. Alternatively, it’s just because the South Korean consulate in SA are super-fantastic. Or at least, the people I dealt with are.

For a start, they are able to read and respond to an email requesting information on how the process should work. Quickly. Which is a revolutionary idea. The actual application required one completed form, one photograph, some money and a passport. That’s all. No forms in triplicate, no jumping through hoops. I simply dropped off the form, money and photo and passport. I’ve also been having an email conversation with them and when I mentioned that I’m hoping to leave shortly, they rushed the visa through. Generally a South Korean visa will take 3 working days to process here in SA – which is pretty amazingly quick anyway. I dropped the application off on Monday late morning and picked it up yesterday at 10am. Quick and easy.

So I now have a visa. Actually, I now have a visa and a flight. It seems the anticipation may finally, actually, be over in just less than a week. Right now now that fills me with relief and happiness and sunshine and light. I imagine it will become less thrilling and increasingly terrifying as the week proceeds.