Visa tips

Voilà some information on how to get a visa for Iran, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

The easiest visa to get is the Uzbekistan Visa: if you are a Austrian, Belgian, UK, Spain, Italian, French, Swiss, German, Japanese or Latvian citizen all you have to do is to fill in the application form, hand it at the embassy with your passport and 2 photos. The visa will be handed in about 2 working days. The visa will cost 40 euro for a 7 days stay, 50 euros for a 15 days stay, 60 euros for a 30 days stay, 80 euros for 3 months.

Regarding the Turkmenistan Visa, to receive it you need a Letter of Invitation (LOI),
which can be obtained only if you book a guided tour in Turkmenistan. We did it with
Stantours (www.stantours.com), a very efficient agency which provided us the LOI in less than 3 weeks. Once you have received this LOI by email or fax you can go to the embassy and get your visa (even immediately if you are lucky). Just have to fill in 2 copies of the form, 2 copies of your passport and 2 photos. As they told us, with the LOI, it seems also possible to get the visa directly at the Turkmenistan border.

To get an Iranian visa, it is also necessary a LOI. On the internet you can find many agencies which can provide you wtih a LOI, paying some fees or booking with them a part of your trip, like 3 or 4 nights in a hotel. Once you get the LOI you can go to the Iranian embassy, fill in the visa application form, give 2 photos (women must be veiled in the pictures ).
The visa costs 60 euros, and it is valid for 30 days and it takes almost a week to receive it.
Anyway the LOI procedure it is not always necessary: a friend of mine, who is in Armenia now and who is going in Iran soon, obtained the visa without LOI, just going to the embassy in Paris with an Iranian friend of him who declared to host him during his staying in Iran…

Hope to have been clear enough…

p.s. as you will notice I will cover the serious part of this blog :-)

(written in Paris)