A disappointing end to a great trip...

I decided to make this a separate blog post because there's a bit of story to tell.

Regular readers might remember this blog post where I mentioned possible glitch in our travel plans. In fact, I'll explain the whole story again for those who might have missed it.

It was late December when I started researching this Kyrgyzstan campervan trip. At the time, I read that Canadians were allowed a 60 day stay in Kyrgyzstan visa free, the same as it had been when we were here in November of 2023. I booked the month long rental the first week of January and I booked the flights one day either side of the rental dates. So a total of 32 days.

But then two days before we left for this trip, I was reading a forum about Kyrgyzstan and someone mentioned that visa free entry for Canadians is 30 days. Of course I though "wait a minute, that's not right", so I did some checking. It turns out that they changed the rules on December 31st! I never thought to check again. So now, it's 30 days out of any 60 day rolling period. 

We had some options on how to get around this, but they were all going to cost more money. We decided to risk just winging it to see if they did anything about it at the airport when we departed.

Well, they definitely wanted to do something about it!

Bjorn snapped this quick shot of us being detained.

We got our boarding passes and went up to the immigration exit where the officer did her thing and then asked "do you know how many days you are allowed to be here? It's 30 days, but you have been 32."

We tried to play dumb, but that didn't work. She led us to her supervisor who said we had to file a report with the police, and pay a fine.

We were expecting that, so it was no surprise. The same thing happened when we overstayed in Turkiye one year, but the fine wasn't payable unless we returned, which we did. At the time, the fine in Turkiye was $100 USD each.

Anyhow, the two police officers took forever to do the paperwork. We were in there close to two hours and the clock was ticking on actually making it to the boarding gate in time. And of course dealing with everything through google translate was also time consuming. The female was actually quite nice, but the guy was a bit gruff. I reminded them at one point when I figured we maybe had thirty minutes before we would miss our flight.

It seemed like they took forever for the first hour and a half and then seemed like they were rushing things at the end. Then, Ruth was told to go with the female officer, and I was left behind with the guy. He types into his phone and passes it to me... "You have to pay 11,000 SOM administration fine, and $1,200 USD for the emergency exit visa". Yikes. I wasn't expecting that! I thought he was trying to scam us and held my ground.

He said it had to be cash, and so I simply shrugged my shoulders and told him we didn't have it. And we didn't. He said I was being stubborn, and we would have to call the consulate. Of course still doing this through google translate.

And the clock is ticking. It's now about 12:05am, and our flight leaves at 12:45am. The boarding gate would close at 12:30am. But we still don't have an exit visa and would still have to go through security and immigration again.

Then he leads me down to where Ruth is with the female cop and another lady who has a portable visa credit card machine in her hand. She actually speaks some English. We're still not quite sure why we had been separated, and thought it was to put pressure on us somehow. Anyhow, she explains that we have to pay 11,000 SOM ($178 CAD, $126 USD) as the police administration fee and that did have to be in cash.

So the grumpy male cop led me over to the row of ATM's and I took out 11,000 SOM. He then brought me to another machine where he typed in a bunch of numbers and my name came up and he inserted 5,500 SOM and the machine printed out a receipt. He then did the same with Ruth's name. The cash definitely didn't go in his pocket.

While I was doing that with the male cop, Ruth and the other two ladies were processing a 107,420 SOM ($1,738 CAD, $1,228 USD) payment to our credit card. The credit card payment went to "MID KR" which comes up as the merchant code for Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Kyrgyzstan. So that didn't go into anybody's pocket either. 

Neither one of us have a problem with the fact that we were fined and had to pay for a visa. We have a problem with the size of the penalty for a two day overstay. We definitely weren't expecting to be out of pocket $1,916 CAD ($1,355 USD) as a result. That stings, and leaves a bit of a bad taste.

We were rushed back up to immigration and quickly through security. We got to the gate to find that they were still loading the plane. We ended up having about 20 minutes to spare, and we used those minutes to say goodbye to Bjorn and Freya who still had another two hours to wait for their flights back to Belgium.

It was a great trip, and it's really too bad to end it on this note. I'm always more than a little bit cynical of anything the government does, so it's not surprising to us that the sour taste was left by actions the government took. First, in changing their visa policy to begin with (because that's what causes problems like this), and second by increasing the fines and fees involved with fixing the problem. 

To the people of Kyrgyzstan, we had a wonderful time in your beautiful country!