The legal complexities of passports and visas when visiting India is dizzying. Before leaving on this trip, I had to get a tourist visa for India, which entailed finding a visa agent, then filling out an very long application in which they asked a great deal of information about me and also about each parent (who are both now deceased but that didn’t seem to matter). The application was especially interested in whether either of my parents were Pakistani. Then I had to send to the agent my passport, a photo ID in which the name and address was exactly the same as on my passport (which caused no end of trouble for my sister who lives in a very rural area where all the residents have post office boxes and India will not accept a post office box as an address), the application, and $175, sent via FedEx (talk about an act of faith!). Somewhere in there I also had to pay an additional $40 fee directly to the Indian embassy. I was relieved when my passport arrived 2 weeks later with an Indian visa.
When we boarded the ship, we had to turn over our passports (the ship had immigration personnel from Egypt and Jordan come onboard to process all the passports and then the ship gave them back to us before we left the ship in each port). Before we reached Dubai (which was the port just before India), the ship crew once again collected all our passports for processing by Indian immigration. This meant that when we left the ship in Dubai, we only had our ship pass card for identification because all our passports were onboard (luckily, I always carry a photo copy of my passport).
The day before Goa (our first port in India), we had to line up to get the following paperwork: a color photo copy of the first 2 pages of the passport and a “landing card” which was a half-page, colored paper with our name, nationality, ship name, dates, and something else I can’t remember, stamped and signed by Indian immigration and requiring our personal signatures. When we left the ship for our Goa tour, we were required to carry with us our ship pass card (issued by the cruise line when we embarked), and the paperwork we just picked up. We all had to show the landing cards to some Indian official on the bus before it could leave. When our tour bus arrived back at the ship at the end of the tour, a uniformed person (looked like a soldier to me) checked that everyone on the bus had their “landing card.” After boarding the ship, we were required to return our landing card, which the ship then returned to the Indian officials to prove that everyone who got off the ship came back on (at least that‘s my best guess).
On the morning of our second stop, Cochin, we had to line up to pick up our passports and another color photo copy of the passport and another “landing card” stamped and signed by Indian immigration and requiring yet another signature. Then we stood in another line for a “face to face inspection” in which an Indian immigration official supposedly checked our passports and then stamped some other kind of paper, and then kept the stamped paper and the passport. (In reality, there were about 10 immigration officials and the line went fairly quickly. And whew, I passed the inspection.) The landing card and passport photo copy, again, had to be displayed in order to leave the port and displayed again before being allowed off the bus at the end of the tour. When we returned to the ship, the ship retained the passports for processing by Malaysian and Singapore officials.
OK, how complex does this whole process really need to be? Compare to Dubai in which nobody ever looked at any paperwork, coming or going. It does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about visiting India.
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