Preparations

Some of the countries we are travelling through are not among the simplest when talking about obtaining visa. None of us has been in Central Asia before, so we needed to gather a lot of information und to start up the visa bureaucracy. We need visa for 5 countries (Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Russia), and three of them have no embassies or consulates in Sweden where we live. To receive information about the visa regulations from official sources showed to be quite difficult, there were nearly no replies on E-mails and fax requests. Some embassies in Berlin have expensive spezial phone numbers that can not be reached from abroad, and information given by phone was sometimes pure nonsense.

Iran was partly quite complicated. It is not so easy to find out which rules apply for independent travellers, sometimes, the consulates seem to make quite arbitrary judgements of individual cases. In addition, the Iranian embassy in Stockholm accepts visa applications no earlier than a month prior to departure - we had to learn this when we had to leave the embassy with empty hands three months prior to our formerly planned departure date.
If you are not citizen of Israel, the USA or UK, it is normally possible to obtain visa as independant traveller, but you cannot be really sure in advance. Therefore, it can be a good idea to contact an Iranian travel agency that can apply for a visa authorization for you at the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs - that works fine even if you do not book any travel arrangements. Then you receive an authorization code that you indicate on your visa application. This way, you obtain your visa at the desired embassy without major trouble. When we visited the embassy and presented our invitation and the other documents, the consular officer began posing a lot of questions about the invitation: Where we had got it from, how we had come into contact with the travel agency, how much it had cost, and so on... we already wondered if something maybe was wrong with the invitation when the officer finally said: "Next time, contact us first. You don't need an invitation."

Turkmenistan is the most restrictive one of the countries we are travelling through in terms of tourist visa regulations. Since a time ago, independent travel has no longer been permitted. You have to travel with a guide, otherwise you will not obtain a tourist visa. The only alternative is to cross the country with a transit visa, however, in this case, you are not allowed to deviate from the direct route. We found a specialized travel agency that can organize individually composed Turkmenistan journeys, so that it won't be such an awful "package tour feeling". The bureaucracy needs a few weeks, as you need an approval from the Turkmen Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ashgabad. But it works trouble-free if you only have a travel agent who knows how it works. This way, it was no trouble to finally obtain the visa.

Uzbekistan has opened up for tourists quite a lot and abolished the need for a letter of invitation for citizens of many countries, but officially not for Swedes. At a visit at the uzbek embassy in Berlin, however, it was no problem to obtain an Uzbek visa both for Till (who is German citizen) and Bengt (Swede) without a letter of invitation.

Kazakhstan has abolished the need for a letter of invitation for most European tourists in February 2004 However, at this time, we had already bought invitations at a price of 30 $ per person at a Kazakh travel agency and obtained the visa about a week earlier...

Russia still requires letters of invitation, but a couple of travel agencies can organize invitations without booking any arrangements. They can also submit visa applications to the embassy; if you want to do it yourself, you need to come to the embassy in person and stand in a queue quite a long time, therefore, it is worth some extra money to get help of a travel agency.