The visa circus continues…

A couple of days ago we were certain that the best option available to us was to get a transit visa through Russia and make our way back down to Iran through Georgia and Armenia …

Yesterday we were told by the Russian embassy that the route we were planning on taking was dangerous and the processing time would take 10 days as opposed to 2 as they needed to make sure we weren’t terrorists…

Back to the drawing board…

Maybe a transit through Azerbaijan?  This would also involve a 2 day boat trip across the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan… A boat that has no timetable so a bit more waiting would also be involved… Not ideal but an option.

We got excited last night because we found out our Iran LOI had come through! With thoughts of getting out of here sooner than we had thought possible, we went to the Iran embassy today only to wait for ages for a translator and then to be told that we had to wait another 3 days for the embassy to receive the LOI…

Which makes it Monday… And then it will take another 2 days… Awesome 😣

So, then we head back to the Turkmenistan embassy with a few more questions before we applied for the Azerbaijan transit visa. 

It turns out that while we still need to wait until we have our Iran visa before we can apply for this transit visa we do have the option of picking the visa up at the border! It takes 5 days extra but this makes everything a little better for us as it means we can leave Dushanbe as soon as we apply for it, travel around Uzbekistan for a week and then head down to the border and hopefully, fingers crossed we can get our visa organised then! It’s a bit of a risk because nothing works out smoothly in this part of the world and we are also going to have to swap passports at the border as our Uzbekistan visa is in our EU passports and the Turkmen will be in our Australian passports 😁 .

There is also the issue that if things don’t go smoothly at the border we would be stamped out of Uzbekistan and stuck in no mans land!

However, I think we are going to go for this option. The Azerbaijan transit visa seems pretty straight forward and cheap but it’s a long way round and the boat is expensive… Still, it’s a plan C if it all falls through with Turkmenistan… Or Iran for that matter as nothing is for sure!

So, we’ve been told to go back to the Iran embassy at 10am on Monday to see if the LOI has been received (I think we may go tomorrow just to check!). Hopefully then we can apply and beg for it to be processed urgently and then once we have that we will apply at Turkmen and beg for that to be processed urgently too!

Who said travel was all fun?!