Today, administration! Yay! /s
Main item: visas. Other items: Carnet de Passage en Douane, international driver’s license, travel insurance and car insurance.
1) Visas
A quick overview of the countries we will be passing, and the need for a visa. For those who require visas, also a quick note on our experience:
- Belgium: no, ofcourse not 🙂
- Germany: no
- Austria: no
- Hungary: no
- Serbia: no
- FYROM (Macedonia): no
- Greece: no
- Turkey: yes, but it’s a simple E-visa, which you can also get at the border
- Georgia: no
- Armenia: no
- Iran: yes. There should be an E-visa now, but we still applied the old fashioned way: we paid an Iranian travel agency to apply for an RN number for us, which we then used to apply at the embassy in Brussels. All in all, pretty straightforward. You need 2-3 weeks, depending on whether you pay extra at the embassy.
- Turkmenistan: yes. Two options: tourist visa or transit visa. Tourist will cost you an arm and a leg, as you have to book a tour with a local travel agency (100€-200€ per day) before you get the visa. So we applied for the transit visa at the embassy in Brussels. Application was three weeks ago, still no news (see the other 8th March post…).
- Uzbekistan: yes, really simple procedure: fill out online form, inform embassy (give them barcode) so they can prepare, go and get visa one week later.
- Tajikistan: yes, but it’s a simple E-visa
- Kyrgyzstan: no
- Kazakhstan: no
- Russia: yes. This is a complicated one. We haven’t applied yet, as you can apply at most 3 months in advance. However, as a Belgian citizen, we can only apply in our home country. But by the time we can apply, we’ll be on the road…
Solution: we’ll apply for a transit visa. Two actually: one from Kazakhstan to Mongolia, one from Mongolia to Europe. Lots of visafun still awaits! - Mongolia: yes. Also have to apply for this one on the road (cf max 3 months in advance), so no feedback yet.
- Russia again
- Finland? Estonia? Sweden? Denmark? We’re not sure about the route back through Europe yet, but from here on, no more visa needed!
2) Carnet de Passage en Douane
Before this trip, we had never even heard of this document. Simply put, this is a passport for your car. To prevent you from selling your car in a certain country (without paying proper import taxes), you get a stamp in a booklet when you enter and exit the country.
The booklet is provided by certain car clubs in each country, members of FIA. What happens is that these car clubs are garantueeing that you’ll comply with the rules of the Carnet. That also means you have to put a couple of thousand €’s (depending on vehicle) in a pledge bank account, which you’ll only get back after your trip…
For our trip, we need this document for Iran. There’s quite a few countries in Africa and Asia where you would need the Carnet, should you go there by car.
3) International driver’s license
In Belgium, you can get this easily at your town hall. Depending on the town, you get your driver’s license immediately or at most after a week. 20€ where we live.
4) Travel insurance
As we’re leaving for almost six months, we need a special travel insurance. Most products only supply insurance for trips for 1 up to 3 months, but there are a few that do the trick.
Fun fact: we are insured worldwide. Our car however, only has travel insurance up to Istanbul. This means if the car breaks down before Istanbul: insurance. If it breaks down after: tough luck. This also means if the car breaks down completely in, say, Turkmenistan, we have to pay for our return plane tickets ourselves. If we were to have an accident and get hurt physically: insurance pays.
5) Car insurance
Our regular car insurance (the “green card”) will only get us as far as the territory of Turkey. After that we’ll need to get border insurance each time we cross the border of a new country. Depending on whether insurance is obligated in the country, of course. Still to find out!
That gives you a broad overview of the administration that is involved with our trip.
We’re also hoping we didn’t forget anything…