I have my Chinese visa. I am just back from picking it up at the consulate in Johannesburg.
...... however, I only have a 30 days visa so I will have to change my plane tickets!
Apparently when it is your first time in China you can only get a 30 day visa. I knew you could only get a single-entry visa but the visa application only gave you choices for:
- Single entry valid for 3 months
- Double entry valid for 6 months
- Multiple entry valid for 6 months
- Multi-entry valid for 12 months
...... So I thought that since all I could get was the single-entry it would be for 3 months and I had planned to stay just over 30 days. But it actually meant was the 30 days have to be within 3 months of me getting the visa, so I have to be out of China by June 15th, which is 3 months from the day I dropped my passport, not even 3 months form the day the visa was issued or the day I was told to show up to pick it up!!
I think that my ticket form Beijing to Hong Kong (which I HAD to buy BEFORE applying for my visa) will be lost and I don't think that I will be able to change it. It is with China Air and the clauses on ticket changes and ticket cancellation are completely incomprehensible in English. My travel agent and myself tried to make sense of them but we couldn't.
I'll admit that it does dampened the joy of finally getting my visa.
ADDED LATER: I managed to change the date of my ticket from Beijing to Honk Kong.
Now I need to change the leg Hong Kong to Brisbane of my Round The World ticket but ultimately if I can't it is not a big deal because in Hong Kong I do not need a visa.
4 comments:
That's frustrating about the visa, although I'm glad you got it. Where are you planning on going in China besides Beijing and maybe Hong Kong? Have you been there before?
I have never been to China before.
The plan is to spend 4 days in Hong Kong. I don't need a visa for Hong Kong, and I originally planned these 4 days in case I didn't get my visa for mainland China thinking I might be able to sort something out in Hong Kong.
Then fly to Chengdu and do some train trips from Chengdu.
Then Beijing with trips around Beijing.
Xian by train too I think.
Back to Beijing, and then Hong Kong to fly to Australia.
How exciting. I've only been to China once, when we lived in Kyrgyzstan before. We loved Xian. I wish we'd had more time to travel around. I'm looking forward to photos!
I am very exited about it. In fact it has been a long time since I have been that thrilled to go to a new place. China is going to be so different for me. I expect that it will be SO different from Africa. I only tried to go there once before when I was in Kazakhstan but couldn't quite find the time to do it and couldn't work out the visas.
I am planning on taking lots of pictures but I probably will only post them after China, maybe even after Australia.
Post a Comment