Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Getting ready our Angolan Visas.

The first most important (and complicated) process is to make ready visas for Angola. You can make it only in the country of your residence. We live in Ireland so we had to apply at the Embassy in London. It takes minimum 4 weeks to make it ready. You can submit all the documents on Mondays and Tuesdays and collections are on Thursdays and Fridays. We did our visas through an agency in Dublin. Uh that was a mission.......

First of all here is the list of the necessary documents we needed:

1. Application form (to be printed on computer, can not be filled in by hand)
2. Original passport
3. Color photocopies of main pages of passport and all the visas 
4. Two (2) recent color passport photographs
5. Itinerary with dates and places you intend to travel
6. Bank Statements (200 USD per day, so if you are applying for 30 day visa you need 6000 USD on your account)
7. Proof of accommodation in Angola (paid hotel reservation).
8. Invitation letter from your host in Angola - we got ours from very helpful people at Flamingo Lodge (http://www.aasafaris.com/)
8. Professional Occupation letter
9. Proof of address
10. Copy of yellow fever Certificate
11. Letter requiring a visa

We planned the whole thing quite in advance because we knew this won't be easy. So we sent all the papers to the agency in Dublin in advance because we needed passports back in max 6 weeks. They promised to return our passport in time. After 4 weeks we started to worry because we needed passports back because of our flights. And agency kept promising to return passports tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..... After 5 weeks of constant calling, e-mailing and keeping them under pressure we got really stressful and furious! Now we didn't care if we had our visas or not, we just wanted our passports back! We lost 195 x 2 = 390€ and no passports! It is said on Angolan Embassy's website that you can withdraw your passports in 24 hours. So we were hoping that 24 hours really means 24 hours!

And just 2 days before a flight we got a call from the agency that they got our passports out of Embassy in London and that they had a better news! There were visas in them! Thank God! We were jumping from happiness!

Now we flying to Cape Town and getting ready for the trip!