acquiring a Bolivian visa
 

We will be traveling to Peru and then to Bolivia in Sept., '08. We are getting our information together for our visa, immunizations, etc. Does anyone know how long we may expect it to take to get the visa application approved once we mail it off to the Bolivian embassy in Washington D.C.? Has anyone gotten their visa at the border crossing?

How about the direct bus from Cuzcu to La Paz? How direct is it really? Should we pack lots of motion sickness medication, as some in the party do get motion sickness?

I may be way off base here (and I don't know your country of orgin), but if a country requires a visa, are you not going to have to show it before you'd allowed to get on your flight along with your passport? That's been our experience so guess I'm just curious why this would be different.

FWIW - Our daughter is in the middle of dealing with visa for Greece (I know, not Boliva) trip in Sept for which she applied 3 months ago. Just got it and it's got mistakes in it, so we're hoping to straighten it out before she goes in 5 weeks. Hopefully, Boliva is more efficient than Greece.

I would call the embassy in Washington and ask how long it takes. Website:

www.bolivia-usa.org

lists the phone numbers.

Bolivia requires you to get a visa in advance. There's no provision to get it at the border the way some countries allow.

We have called the numbers for the embassy a couple of times and all I get is a recording telling me the same information as is on their web site. Knowing we need to get the visa before we get there is a help. We were under the impression, don't know from where, that we could take the needed items and present them at the border.

As we are flying to Lima first, from Miami, we don't need it to start our trip, just to get to our final destination.

There have been posts here in the past from people who tried to get a Bolivian visa at the border and could not. The only other option would be to take care of this at the Bolivian embassy in Lima, but you would be taking up valuable travel time and tying up your passport doing that. I'd take care of it here and soon. :)

Today we reached someone at the consulate, rather than the embassy. The woman spoke English and it was a REAL person, as opposed to a recorded message. She was very encouraging about our timeline. Tomorrow we get the yellow fever immunization. The letter from our Bolivian student inviting us to Bolivia (required) seems to have gotten lost in the mail. Our daughter, who got hers, is sending us a copy as all of us are named in the letter. We should have everything in the mail by the weekend. Our advice to everyone. Start sooner than we did and save yourself the stress.

We have our visas in hand. From the day we mailed out the required information it took about 10 days for our passports with attached visas to return to us. We sent them to Washington DC from the west coast in prepaid mailers. We were amazed at the speed with which they were processed after having so much trouble trying to talk to someone. Glad that step is behind us. By the way, the yellow fever document is requested in a Spanish translation, but the official form comes in a French/English translation. Evidently that wasn't a problem.

"By the way, the yellow fever document is requested in a Spanish translation, but the official form comes in a French/English translation. Evidently that wasn't a problem." Thank you! I've been trying to figure out whether I needed to have my yellow fever CDC cert translated from French/English to Spanish for the last few hours. Hopefully, the visa folks will agree that French/English is close enough to Spanish for government work!

We received our visa for Bolivia in about 10 days from the day it was mailed in (with the yellow fever certificate in French/English). However, we did not use it due to the unrest there. We do plan to try again after things settle down politically. (And we save up more money.) We spent the entire 3 weeks in Peru - not long enough for that country either.

After all of our concern about getting the visa and our passports back in time, that appears to have been the least of our worries when it comes to Bolivia.

Our Bolivian itinerary is likely limited to Laz Paz and the salt flats (crossing over to Atacama, Chile), so hopefully that's a relatively safe itinerary...

We just returned from Bolivia and simply got our VISA in LaPaz. It was quick and easy. But do be prepared to pay your VISA fee in clean new bills. Even the slightest tear or mark on the bill and they wanted clean ones.

Kim