The paper trail!!!

Who would have thought it so difficult to get on a bike and ride somewhere. The amount of paper generated by this exercise will fill three London bendy buses. It's not that it's difficult but it's very time consuming. These are a couple that we have/had to organse for our trip:

Passport: After Rensche agreed to marry me she also decided to change her name...so she needed a new passport. My passport was expiring in June 2008 so I also had to renew mine otherwise it would fail the requirement of having 6 months left for entering most Southern Africa countries. So in January we wrote to SA House and they promptly posted us all the required forms. Four of them were straightforward but on of them required a complete set of fingerprints. Well as you do back in SA we popped down to the closest police station; in Poole at the time; and asked to be fingerprinted. The duty officer grinnned as he correctly anticipated our reaction to the news that they could only fingerprint people who had been arrested and were not allowed to fingerprint members of the public or "Walk-in Customers". Something about Human rights or sexual harrasment and assault chargers...bla bla bla. If we wanted to get fingerprints we would have to make an appointment at the Police Fingerprint Bureau at the Police Headquarters. Well after 5 days of trying to explain that we need these prints but aren't going to put in leave to do so the ladies at the Fingerprint Bureau very kindly offered to help us after hours. So after finally getting our prints done we posted off our passport applications and held our breath....and waited...and waited....and waited. We tried a number of times to phone SA House but their lines we eitehr permanently engaged or would just ring and ring so eventually at the end of May I emailed SA House and they said that our passports had just arrived an we could collect them. 5 months to issue a new passport to an existing citizen...what can I say.

LOA: or Letter of Authority which we had to get from the SABS (South African Bureau of Standards) which is required to ensure the bikes are of an exceptable quality standard to be imported. Mr Snyman from SABS was very helpful and it was a very straightforward 3 day exercise.

ITAC Permit: ITAC are the people that give you pemrission to import your bike into the Southern African Trading Zone...or something like that. Again Rene was very helpful and in a few days it was all sorted.

Carnet: Well this is effectvily your "Get out of customs and excise" card. It allows you to pass through borders (of countries that use it) without having to pay up customs duties and then go through the effort of applying for duties returned when exiting the country. Without this document you could, in most countries, simply purchase a Temporary Import Permit (TIP) but in our case Egypt insists on a carnet. The RAC who supplied the Carnet also required a guarantee, surety or cash deposit of 800% of your vehicle value for this document for our route...yes thats a hell of a lot of money. In my case I got a bank guarantee from my bank which was a very easy process although not surprisingly the attendant at the local branch had no clue what I was talking about and had to make some phone calls. Rensche tried to do the same with her bank "Barclays Isle of Mann". They were utterly useless and after chasing them for 2 weeks they said they don't supply guarantees for carnets; this contrary to what everyone else (including barclays UK) was telling us. Well we are now going for the Surety option which will cost us about £350.

V5: This is the UK version of the vehicle registration document. Nothing new here but in the event of an engine failure 5 weeks before your trip and needing to have it updated with a new engine number, then it becomes an issue. And when you phone up the DVLA and they refuse to say anything other than the standard "It will take 2-4 weeks" then it makes you a bit nervous especially when you need the document back to apply for your carnet and carry out your MOT etc.

ICMV (International Certificate of Motor Vehicles): This is simply a document which contains all the information about your vehicle as found in your V5 but presented in various languages which makes life much easier when filling out forms at borders or at police checkpoints. We got ours from the RAC.

Visa's: The ones that matter to us Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia. We will let you know how we get on as we go through these countries and whetehr our approaches worked or not. From Kenya southwards we have no problem as we are travelling on SA passports.

Jordan visa: SIX months visa with same day service for FREE at the Jordanian Embassy. Note the form on their website is wrong. Fill in and submit the latest version of the form there and then at the embassy. Just bring a passport photo.

IDP (International Driving Permit): Well it's exactly that, a document containing all your drivers license information but presented in various languages. We got ours from the RAC.

Travel Insurance: Yes it does cover everything under the sun including medivac and repatriation back to the UK...but which government is going to send one of their choppers out to pick a foolish tourist who thinks he can cross Africa on a motorbike... Unfortunately we can't say "I'm an American!!!" or "I'm British!" and see the cavalry fly in. Hopefully SA being a member of the African Union might swing things our way.

Work in progress....will be back with more