Australia Post will not send passports securely overseas and I have to engage the services of an international courier firm. As so much stuff ordered online gets delivered by one of these companies these days it does not seem to be such a big deal. Toll has set up a specific visa service for passports but the price at $360 for each application (on top of already steep visa fees) is excessive combined with waivers that do not promise turn around times less than 25 days per visa. No good for my deadline. Fedex never seemed to answer the phone while DHL proved to be bright and breezy with a “can do” attitude and a price of $100 each way on top of the visa fee. DHL got the gig.
The envelope over to the US was quite bulky with paperwork and I checked and rechecked every item. The fee for the visa was $190US and it had to be by bank cheque. I remember asking about the strange looking paperwork from the bank, none of it looked like a cheque but was reassured that it was all there. I copied it all and sent the originals with a self addressed envelope to be couriered back. I tracked it all on line all the way and 3 days later it had been signed for by the Uzbek embassy in Washington. Mistakenly, not wishing to be a nuisance I did not contact the embassy for a week figuring my covering letter with contact details if there was a problem would suffice. As I get back onto the Uzbek embassy website to get the phone contact details my heart sinks a little. In among the fine print of the visa application details is a list of their preferred couriers and DHL does not figure among them. I have to get up at 6 am to phone and catch the embassy at 4pm Washington time the only time they are actually available for phone enquiries. The Uzbek at the other end, Mr Ismailov, in halting English confirms that they have received my application but will not act until they have payment and they are waiting for the cheque not the copy of the statement from the bank that I have sent. As I sit at my home desk in Rosebud half a planet away in the predawn light and examine my copies of the paperwork I am horrified to see that he is right. The only thing the bank issued is a copy of the cheque, not the original!
I scamper to the bank that morning between patients and a cheque is reissued. Australia Post is the next port of call and we pay for the highest price express service. Again I track on line and within 24 hours it has made Los Angeles. The tracking ceases there and it is days before we find out how to trace it through the US postal system. I take to anxiously ringing the embassy at 6 am every alternate day, by now I know Mr Ismailov at the other end but he pretends not to recognise me on any occasion. It takes an amazing 8 more days for the cheque to travel from LA to DC! In the meanwhile as my anxiety increases I quiz Mr Ismailov how long it will take him to issue a visa. He promises a quick turnaround once the cheque arrives and is presented to their bank but their finance officer only goes to the bank once every couple of weeks! He also confirms that while DHL is not a preferred courier they have dealt with them before so all should be allright.
I phone on the day that the cheque has arrived at the embassy to be told that they have already, suddenly, issued the visa and sent my passport back that same day. Celebrations, back on track. Despite the lost time I have in the interim rearranged my arrival into Kazakhstan with the ever reliable David of Stantours to fly in and get a visa on arrival at the airport with an LOI, one less overseas journey for my passport to collect another visa. My passport should come back home in a couple of days leaving me just with a Tajik visa to get.
Two days on and nothing is happening as I try to track the return journey through DHL. Repeated phone calls now to DHL yield dead ends so it is awake again at 6am to ring Mr Ismailov. Again he repeats the story that my passport went off already. As I challenge him about the details my heart sinks. He relates that he tried to activate the bar code on the return envelope online at the DHL website in the US. When it was not recognised he chose not to email me to arrange pick up rather to send a staff member a block down the road to post my passport into a DHL drop box. Disaster!
Frantic calls to DHL ensue and suddenly the friendly “can do” facade slips. They can do nothing until there has been a pick up and deny any knowledge of the existence of DHL drop boxes. At this point I also discover that there is a DHL Australia and DHL USA and while nominally the one company they do not share databases and know nothing about each other!!! My frantic calls move offshore to DHL USA and we actually manage to isolate the drop box that the passport has been put in. Despite the denials from DHL Australia over the existence of these drop boxes it is actually a DHL Express drop box and the prospect for finding my passport firm up. I fire off an email to the Uzbek embassy regarding the missing passport and amazingly get an email back from the consul immediately despite it being late at night in Washington DC. Not once has the embassy initiated contact with me and this new turn seems to be a positive. Alas this proves unwittingly to be my final mistake as the Ubek embassy contacts DHL and request a search. Subsequent calls by me to the previously helpful DHL USA are now met with a standard response that they are investigating on behalf of the Uzbek embassy, they can tell me nothing and I need to contact the embassy. They hide behind a barrier and the die is cast! I now know where this will end. Gloomily I wait another week calling the embassy every second day. When I cancel my passport online after a week I know I have no choice. I also deep down know that my passport will be found in the near future but I have run out of time.
My well organised plans are in tatters!