Anyone who has looked at obtaining a visa for Turkmenistan will know it is not as simple to get as it is for many of the other countries in Central Asia. For a normal Tourist visa a guide is required & trips normally have to be booked through a recommended agent. I have heard a 5 day Transit visa is possible from the Turkmenistan embassy in Baku & other surrounding countries but it will have set dates. This is probably fine if entering from a land border crossing such as Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan, but it is a bit tight if you are catching the ferry from Baku. You may run a risk of losing some days from the visa is the ferry is delayed or you may arrive too early to activate it.
So, this post is to give an indication of how much it cost us in 2015 for the 5 day Transit visa with a car.
- Letter of Invitation arranged from the UK £50 each
- 5 day Transit Visa on arrival USD$63 each
- Fee once we had disembarked from ferry in Turkmenbashi USD$13. We think this was for something known as a bridge fee (it is likely you will come across a few of these in Central Asia)
- 3rd Party Insurance USD$35
- Fuel Duty USD$73
- Car entry & temporary passage USD$30
- Vehicle disinfection USD$1 – (?? – don’t remember this being done
) - Plus an additional 15% for Bank Services.
)All in all, we both left Turkmenbashi with an additional 15 pieces of paper. Don’t yet think Turkmenistan has gone paperless.
As we were part of the Mongol Rally we were able to obtain a 5 day Transit Visa on the border. We were able to do this as we had arranged a group Letter of Invitation in advance through a visa company called the visa machine. Even though it was meant to be much easier to obtain the visa on arrival, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the visa machine & would look at alternatives if I was trying to arrange a visa again to Turkmenistan.
In our case (& it was the same for all 2015 ralliers going through Turkmenistan) the letter of invitation wasn’t emailed to us all until the Friday before leaving. Unfortunately it didn’t give us any time to resolve the problems with the group invitation. Firstly they had people on the wrong list (ralliers going in through Iran were listed on the Baku letter & vice versa. Some teams had members on different lists). This ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem but each letter has the point of entry & exit. We were on the right letter but our name & personal details (such as passport details) were clearly visible to everyone else on the list as were theirs to us. We then noticed our exit point was incorrect. After many email exchanges between us & the Visa Machine we eventually conceded & stuck with the details provided on the original letter. I managed to gain a copy of the letter with my name listed with all the others blacked out but for John we gave up. Before leaving the UK we just printed off the 2 original letters provided with everyone else’s details visible & hoped we wouldn’t have any difficulties. I think we were naive to think that would be the last we would hear from the Visa Machine.
Whilst we were all on the road & somewhere in Europe, we all found out the LOI provided by the Visa Machine was unsigned. Apparently it is a requirement of the letter to be signed by an approved authoriser of the Ministry of Turkmenistan. To say this was frustrating was an understatement. Once again, the email exchange ensued. It took a few days to receive the updated LOI but again, we couldn’t get the correct copy for John. We gave up & hoped that our original LOI print outs would be sufficient. We had heard recent updates that teams ahead of us managed to gain the visa on arrival without the signature but others had used the updated LOI. All we could do was hope.
As it turned out, luck was on our side the day we arrived in Turkmenbashi. The officials didn’t appear to pick up on the missing signature & after the many hours of going backwards & forwards between offices we were given our passports back with an additional green sticker. We now had our visa into Turkmenistan!
