How many Ukrainians can you fit into a trunk? It wasn’t a joke when we asked the question.
Oleksandra shifted her body under the seat and we piled a few blankets over her. That definitely wasn’t going to work. How were we going to get her across the border?
She had initially had her Ukrainian passport turned down for a visa by the Indian government, but in the end she wowed them during her interview and was issued the elusive stamp. The rest of us, 3 US citizens, had received our approval in a few days. We had a pretty clever plan. We’d travel through India, make our way to the Bhutan border and then get our Bhutanese tour guides to pick us up.
Bhutan is not the easiest place to visit and by the time you pay the daily government fees, the tour fees, then the ridiculously priced airline ticket to fly from Delhi, a few days in the country costs thousands. My hack shaved a day of fees off the trip and bypassed the $800 flight. We’d enter at the Indian border, then return the same way. Our tour operators would make the Thimpu to Jaigon drive and escort us into Bhutan. We had a foolproof plan.
What we hadn’t noticed was that Oleksandra’s Indian visa was a single entry. She’d be able to visit India no problem, but getting back after our Bhutan excursion, so we could finish our itinerary and do the flight home would be impossible without modifying that visa. We began working on it immediately.
Indian bureaucracy is maddening. One Indian office sends you to another office which has you fill out forms and send them to another office who tells you that you have the wrong office. There are so many useless departments with people who do nothing but create more rules and send you on wild goose chases, that most applicants just give up, which could be the plan anyway. That’s assuming there’s a plan and you’re dealing with an entity that makes any logic or sense at all. That’s a big assumption.
We were getting nowhere but discouraged. Oleksandra applied for another visa which would hopefully kick in once she was ready to re-enter the country. We checked its progress daily as we toured India throughout the next few weeks. She still had received no word on the day we were to go to Bhutan. Our guides met us in Jaogon and we crossed the border and started our 3 day tour of Bhutan. Time was running out. One of our guides had a connection with the Indian embassy. Hours of phone calls got is nowhere. As we finished up our tour in Bhutan a few days later, we headed back to the Indian border. A few hours from India, an email finally arrived informing Oleksandra that she would not be welcome to revisit India.
Without a visa, there’d be no crossing into India. To stay additional time in Bhutan would be $300/day and a complicated process to extend the tourist visa. With a Ukrainian passport, the only options were to drive 3 hours back to the capital, fly to Kathmandu and buy new tickets to the US OR sneak back into India. There were no flights to Kathmandu for 2 days. The guides had no place for her to stay and she couldn’t run around Bhutan on her own. Sneaking into India was our only option.
Days before when we had crossed the border, we had to go to a special building, fill out some forms and get a stamp to exit the country. Coming back we’d have to visit the same officer. Could we bribe him? That was the first idea. Bribing an immigration officer could land all of us in jail. Indian jail was certainly worse than lots of other jails, so that was going to be our last option.
The giant wall between Bhutan and India most certainly didn’t extend the entire length of the country. Maybe it had a section missing or a hole where some pesky Indians had tunneled through. After further examination, we determined that there was no road that followed the wall, so searching for a compromised section would have involved an arduous hike into the Himalayan mountains.
Pole vaulting only works in cartoons or Olympics. Digging through solid rock wasn’t likely to work either.
The only reasonable option was to distract the immigration officers or just run through the checkpoint and hope no one had guns. Our guides wanted to help us, but couldn’t get too involved. As luck would have it, we got our exit stamps from the Bhutanese, but would have to return back to the separate building in the Indian side where we had originally stopped to get an entrance stamp. This was the place where we would have to try to bribe the official. Or would we? What if we just didn’t go there at all? The Bhutanese side didn’t really care about what happened once they had stamped us out.
Running around in any country without a visa was a recipe for disaster, but chances were no one would look for that stamp until our flight home from Jaipur a week later. Our guides helped us arrange a taxi back towards Bagdogra where we’d fly to Varanasi. Since we were now back in India, any domestic flights or trains wouldn’t require an inspection of our passport.
We showed our passports to hotel staff daily, but no one cared to look at the stamps. However, finally the day arrived where we’d have to fly internationally and our subterfuge would be discovered. Three of us would be fine since we had multiple entry visas, but Oleksandra could be detained since she was there illegally. The good news is at least she wouldn’t have to pay $300/day to stay in India (like Bhutan charges). What could they do to her after all? Deport her? Okay. That wouldn’t be so bad.
After I’d gotten stamped, I stayed by the counter chatting with the airport official as we handed over Oleksandra’s passport. The distraction worked and the previous exit stamp was completely missed.
Our Ukrainian friend was home free. We’d gotten away with it. No one was going to Indian jail!
Maybe we could try this is North Korea.