As Mark said on his blog, the hard part of the bicycle tour is not the riding itself, but the fight with the bureaucracy. I didn’t know this before because I only had to buy a Turkish visa once, when I went to Ölüdeniz to a paragliding safety training camp. It was easy – I just had to pay the 20 EUR at the airport. But when you travel further, be prepared to the fact that the visa system was invented without asking long-distance cyclists about their opinion.
We were told by a Czech guy that it is best to arrange all of the visas before start. Now we know that it is impossible. I’ll tell you an example.
Turkey is the first country on our route which needs a visa, but we can get it at the border at entrance time. To Georgia we don’t need a visa if we stay there for less than 90 days. We can get the Armenian visa at the border as well. The first problematic country is Iran.
I went to the Iranian embassy in Budapest. I explained our plan to the ambassador. He told me that in our case we would need an Iranian transit visa – this is the rule. If I get a normal tourist visa, I must leave where I entered. They notify the border guards in advance about our arrival and if we try to exit elsewhere, we would not succeed. (According to the others on the Thorn Tree forum, this is a bullshit of course.) But a prerequisite for applying for an Iranian transit visa is that we already have the next country’s visa in our passports – which is Turkmenistan. I called the Turkmen embassy in Vienna – both the the Iranian and the Uzbek visas are prerequisites for the Turkmen transit visa! But they would be willing to make an exception in our case if the Iranian ambassador would sign a paper stating the above fact. But he wouldn’t…
Why a transit visa to Turkmenistan? Why not a normal visa then? – you might ask. Because a normal 30-day tourist visa would be extremely complicated and expensive to get. LOI (letter of invitation) signed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ashgabat + detailed plan + hotel reservations + a hired guide for all days (100-200 USD/day). Almost as difficult as Tibet. In contrast, the transit visa is extremely easy to get, but it is only valid for 5 days from the date of entrance! We must ride quite fast but it may be possible to do it according to my calculations. If we survive the Karakum desert.
We could arrange a 55 EUR Turkmen transit visa for a future date which is far enough for us to get there (3-4 months), but for the Iranian visa the rule is that it is valid for 3 months and we can stay 30 days there within this 3 months (we must leave before it expires). It would take 2 months to get there and 30 days to cross – which means that we must time it very precisely and apply for the visa 2-3 weeks before start (that is how long the visa procedure takes). And then we must hurry and can’t modify our plan, can’t make detours, must always worry about visa expiry date, etc.
So we decided not to get the visas in advance at all! What’s more, because we don’t go on 6-month bike tours every weekend, we don’t know yet how far we’ll get. I know that I’m a robot (according to Zsófi) and can pedal for a long time, but together with Zsófi we only did 2 days at most.
Plan B is to get Iranian visa in Tbilisi and Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik visas in Tehran – a city that we wanted to avoid because it’s a nightmare for cyclists as we’ve heared (air pollution, traffic, etc.). I hope that our Iranian visa won’t expire while we’re waiting for these other visas there.
If only there would be no visa obligation for cyclists… They really could make an exception, couldn’t they?
