Obtaining the visa to enter to Sudan took me longer than I expected. From Eritrea my passport could not be sealed and I had to come back to Ethiopia. It meant to go back two thousand kilometres through Djibouti again.
Obtaining the visa to enter to Sudan took me longer than I expected. From Eritrea my passport could not be sealed and I had to come back to Ethiopia. It meant to go back two thousand kilometres through Djibouti again.
The border between Eritrea – Sudan is officially closed, there isn’t any frontier check point and the most of Eritreans think that crossing that border would be dangerous as there are some fundamentalists who had killed an English man some months ago.
But it also exists the possibility to enter Sudan by truck, crossing in this way the 40 kilometres through the area of conflict. It isn’t a problem for local people or for people from other Arabic countries, because they are allowed to do this.
Not being a Muslim, trying to enter to a country with this characteristic without a sealed passport, it can be a reason to be sent to prison. I thought it was a good idea to take a plane from Asmara (the capital city of Eritrea) to Khartoum (the capital city of Sudan) and from there, to go on with my trip by bike.
But there was no way. The procedure for obtaining a visa through Sudan Embassy in Eritrea, which is really bureaucratic and in fact, they make this task so complicated; that my tolerance was over, indeed.
Initially they told me that it was an ordinary procedure for tourists. It was the first time, during my trip through Africa, that an Embassy needs to ask previously for authorization to the country of origin, to give a visa. So I have decided to start with this as it seemed to be easy and fast.
In practice, the days became weeks, and I went on waiting ingenuously for the Embassy promises. My patience was running out because I had to go every day to listen to the same answer: “Nothing yet”. Sometimes I lost my temper and I wanted to kick the door or to swear at them but I couldn’t. It is a fact that I didn’t want to come back 2000 km.
Five weeks has passed, enough time to realize that the procedure was not only bureaucratic, but my Spanish passport didn’t like them at all as well. They were post-war months with a brother country. My Argentinean passport had expired. Hell!!! The Japanese who was before me, got his visa in fifteen days.
Such another times, power happens absolutely, but this time it came from an employee who saw me every day in his office and told me: “And what?” “USA Embassy delays more than us”. That was his explanation. This time was the international policy that had influenced on my trip.