Originally published at: How a tiny visa mistake almost ruined a Vietnam trip - Boing Boing
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Ah, border crossings. Many, many moons ago, when I was traveling to Australia from the US by myself at the age of 15, I didn’t fill out the “where are you staying” question on the entry card because I didn’t know, as I was meeting an adult at the airport who knew the details. The border guard told me I was not going to be able to enter the country if I didn’t know. This was before cell phones, and I was left in an empty arrival hall with no way back or forward. Talk about stressful for a 15 year old. After about a half hour of sitting there freaking out, I got in a different line to hopefully get some kind of help. That border guard just took my papers, stamped my passport, and let me in, no issue at all about the unfilled question.
Much more recently, I found that crossing borders in Africa is… more loose. On flying in to South Africa, I’d paid $100 for somebody to meet us at the plane and guide us through entry, as I had my 11 year old son with me and South Africa can be touchy about child trafficking. This guy “guided” us by almost entirely bypassing border control. He just took us to a border guard who didn’t even look at us, just chatted with him while he offhandedly stamped our passports.
Later on that trip, on entering Zambia from Botswana, the border guard wanted to see my son’s birth certificate. I realized I’d left it in the car, so I went back out of the building to see that the driver had already taken the car across the border. So… I walked across the border, which nobody batted an eye at, got the birth certificate, walked back across the border, then went back into the building to be ‘allowed’ across the border.
Final story (I won’t tell about my sneaking into Angola illegally for a cocktail), crossing from Zambia to Zimbabwe, it was a long line of people, with the border guard just taking passports without looking at them, asking for $40, and then throwing the passport onto a table on the other side of him for the person to collect. When I got up to him, he took my passport and said, “$90”. I said, “Wait, why is it $90? It should be $40.” Another guard with an AK-47 stepped forward and the first guard said, “$90”. I got the hint and paid the $90.
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That’s why you gotta make sure that when they catch you at the border, you got visas in your name.
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Ever thus with bureaucrats. Your papers must be “in order”, or one way or another you’re going to be paying. That goes double at an international border.
I have a middle name I almost never use. This is a useful reminder.
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A border guard in Bolivia once stamped my passport with an ‘Exit’ stamp when I was entering the country. As luck would have it, about three hundred meters after the border crossing I had to show my papers at a police checkpoint, where the cops immediately spotted the anomaly. To their credit, instead of making a big scene, they just had the bus driver’s assistant run back to the border with my passport to get the correct stamp.
Imagine how much fun I’d have had if no one had noticed and I later tried to leave the country with a passport that said I’d already left.
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Later, I also realized why I’d forgotten to include my middle name: The electronic visa application didn’t have a specific spot labeled for it.
Time to pull this out again:
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My wife’s passport gives her surname in two parts with brackets – XXX(YYY).
We haven’t yet found a computer system anywhere which accepts that brackets can be part of the name officially printed in your passport.
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