Travelling Trunks

There could not have been a more dramatic start to a family holiday. I was at the doorstep of the Embassy of Romania in Delhi on the dot of 12 noon,  picked up our four visa-stamped passports, heaved a combined sigh of relief and thanks to the officer, drove straight onwards to the Delhi airport, caught my flight as the airplane doors were closing and landed in Bangalore at 400 pm. I rushed home, threw whatever clothes I could find into my suitcase (I had already forewarned my family that they needed to be packed and ready) and in half hour did an about turn back to the airport with the family from where we caught a flight to Mumbai and, a few hours later, to Bucharest.

It had been many weeks that we had been trying for a visa to Romania, first through a travel agent and then directly.  There were all kinds of challenges – the consulate was closed, the rings would go unanswered, the limit on the number of applications for the day had been reached and so on. I had been trying the listed telephone number several times over even as we were getting closer to our day of departure. Finally, on the Monday of the Friday we were to leave, I got through, only to be told that the only option was to be in Delhi on Tuesday morning to submit the application. And that was how I took a flight to Delhi late Monday night and stood in line on Tuesday to submit our visa application. Big tall gates faced me as I stood in queue on the road outside. The gate was opened to allow one person at a time…one travel agent and then one individual, another travel agent and then another individual. Occasionally we would see a door open and officers come out to grab a smoke and head back in. And then suddenly through all of this and as I watched, tentative and wondering if my turn would ever come, my name was called loud and clear. My call of desperation the previous day had worked. I gave the office my spiel…that my flight was just two days away, that this was the first Eastern Europe country we were taking our children to, that we were excited to show them around Transylvania and the beauty of the region. “I will try but I cannot promise,” he said. “Your application has to be routed to Bucharest and back and there’s only so much we can do here.” He asked that I come by on Thursday, the last visa collection day for the week to check if our visas had been processed and that was how we finally were able to leave for Romania.

For many travelers from India, the pain of getting a visa is a real one given the number of countries that require Indians to have a visa. For me, the visa application process is a journey of discovery and an experience that can be as eventful as the journey itself. Who knew, for instance, that when Turkey launched visas on arrival for Indians, the airports would manage this process effortlessly while the highway immigration and border security forces would, much to our embarrassment, hold up our bus for two hours at the Bulgaria-Turkey border while they checked and cross-checked what the process was and then slowly tried to put the system to work? Or that I could apply for an online visa to Cambodia (and this was at least a decade ago) at work and reach home in fifteen minutes to find the visa in my mail box? Or that for one country, I would have to get a no objection from my husband to say I could travel on my own? Or that I would check in at Bangalore airport to fly out to Colombo via Chennai only to find that my name had been misspelt on my e-visa but that I could reapply for my visa at Bangalore and have it ready by the time I landed in Chennai? Or that I could, in no time, not just extend my visa in Germany by a day but because their systems were down be told to make the payment online whenever I could and at my own convenience? Or that the Consul General of the Embassy of the Republic of Bulgaria would personally call me when my husband and I were travelling to Bulgaria to ask for one more document from me and would then call me thereafter to update me on the status of my visa and confirm that our passports had been dispatched? Or that my family would be standing at Zagreb airport, two on each side of two immigration officers who could not decide whether we should be allowed in or not? It was like ping pong in motion as they went at each other, alternating with a ‘da’ and ‘ne’ until the ‘da’ officer won.

The journey could end (or begin depending on how you want to look at it) with an equally delightful experience as I discovered when my younger daughter and I landed at Guatemala airport and the Immigration Officer, when he learnt I was from India, leaned over to ask if I could answer a question about India. “Is it true,” he asked, “that it gets so hot in India in summer that the white lines on the road melt into the tar?”  I felt sorry I didn’t know enough to paint vivid imagery for him of white lines that dissolved into black goo, of footwear ensnared by hot tar…but we had a good laugh over his question and set foot into a land of another exotic holiday.