I normally ignore countries for which I have to get a visa and all the following apply: the consulate is not in my city and I have to wait for days for visa to be issued and the visa is not on arrival. It just isn’t worth the wasted time and energy and money when there are places for which there is less bureaucracy.
The worst visa waiting times that I ever tried when I was young and unknowing were Iran – about a month although it was very long ago and perhaps it changed now – and… Tunisia! Some time ago (until a few years after 2004) Polish passports needed a visa to enter Tunisia. We used to go for work to Tunisia very often and each time there was 14 days’ waiting time! But… group trips, which always have it easier, were excluded. So, for work we would fly Sunshine Airlines or so, enter the country (“I’m with this group”) via some beach resort with a mediocre beach hotel booked and then take taxis to Tunis. Apparently no-one cared how we left so we would leave via Tunis airport on a regular airline.
Then Ghana arrived. The supposedly friendliest country in West Africa. 2 weeks waiting time, passport sent via expensive courier to Berlin, had to be picked up, but the courier cannot queue for passport collection so we’d use an intermediate company to apply and collect for us and at times they seemed worse bureaucrats than the embassy itself and they asked for EUR60 for the service… This is the best business idea ever: a company collecting passports for the visas, a company that obviously “takes no responsibility for the outcome of the visa granting process”. Golden eggs all over.
On my trip it’s difficult to bypass Ghana. There is Burkina Faso to the North and I thought I could do it but it only gets more bad news. There was a Canadian worker kidnapped and killed in January, there is a couple who travelled via Mali to Togo by car missing since December. And the country gets redder and redder on my lately favourite website: diploumatie.gouv.fr. Ther is also an article on Burkina Faso in The Economist, which is only sad.
So, Ghana it is, with its difficult visa.
Of course Ghana embassy does an express process but it’s a bit of a rip-off and here I am travelling by myself so I decided to break my own rule, for the sake of Africa, it’s a sentimental trip, I’m in love etc. Took a week for DPD to deliver the passport (“we take 2 days to deliver to Germany”), the visa was granted the same day to be collected in 13 days. Picking the passport up is tricky (see above) so I decided to charge my mom half of the petrol price to Berlin and go with her. She wanted to see Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate, it’s only fair.
It’s a 6-hour-drive from Kraków to Berlin, the road is good except the last stretch to the border on Polish side which is either weird or horrible. Two lanes of what looks like a proper motorway are built on top of a road that everyone says Hitler built and I think the concrete slabs from 1940 are barely glued together by Poland of 1990 and there is 70kmh speed limit, the dual carriage road is so bad. I once read about a German driver stopped going on the other half (newly constructed and quite OK but still not motorway speed limit) against the traffic direction because he thought the other half was being under repair, it looked so bad to him. It’s only 80kms or so but I’m never going to complain about roads anywhere else, it’s so very bad.
We also took my 7.5-year-old niece. Hania, to Berlin. She has a scratch map of Europe where she marks the countries that she visited so there was a reason for her to go. In the embassy she probably saw her first black people, and there were many! She got intimidated but when I asked her if she still wants to go to Africa, she said yes. My girl. Though what she’ll probably remember most from Berlin is a lone naked man standing in front of Brandenburg Gate. Not quite naked, she was disappointed “that thing” was covered. Of course it was covered, it was +3 degrees! The man was shouting that he’s the emperor of the Great Germany.
On the way back I was falling asleep behind the wheel. I arrived back after 1am, 20hours after I left. I got the visa but it only reminded me that getting visas from remote embassies is a waste of time, energy and money. Ghana should relax and at least let us people pick our visas outside our “home jurisdiction” and the best would be visa on arrival, seriously.
Coming back to Maman 
