Visa.The most important travelling document you need is obviously your passport. Therefore it is imperative that you have a valid passport which will be valid for another six months upon your return home. This off course is common knowledge, but for us the preparations meant a more extensive approach. We wanted to arrange all the paper work beforhand as much as possible and that meant visa applications. A visum is not compulsory for every country and experience has taught us that at a lot of border crossings visa are obtainable on the spot. However in order to be as well prepared as possible we wanted all the necessary visa to be obtained beforhand. The visa application for any African country usually takes a couple of days and most African embassies are not located in Holland. Most of the embassies are located in Brussels, Belgium and for the embassy of the Central African Republic we even had to travel to Bonn, Germany. This posed us a first problem, the application of visa for over 20 African countries could well mean a fulltime job for two months. The second problem we encountered was the validity of the visa. A visum must be used within three months of its admission. For a journey that will take up to five months this is hard to comply to. The solution as we found it was through the Visumdienst in Rotterdam. This is a professional company that takes care of all visa applications for large companies such as Philips. They travel to Brussels daily with a lot of passports and know their way around virtually every embassy. They were kind enough to offer us their services for free and assist us in our applications. This way we reduced the time that we would spend on visa applications drastically to one full day of filling in application forms with the whole team. The second problem of visa validity was tackled by applying for a second passort. This is possible in special cases and regulations for this second passport are dependant of the country of residence. In cooperation with the Visumdienst it was decided to use the first passport for the visa of the first half of the journey, and while we would be on the road already, the Visumdienst would apply for the rest of the visa using the second passport. The second passport had thus to be sent to Africa by secure mail. The Dutch embassy in Ghana agreed to receive the passports through diplomatic mail, and we were allowed to pick them up in Accra upon showing our first passport. In our experience with border crossings we found that having your visa ready often saves you a lot of time and possible bribe money. On the other hand the visa tend to be more expensive at the embassies than at the border. Apart from visa there of course is a lot more paperwork to arrange beforehand. For completeness we listed below the documents you should not forget.
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