A Friggin Nightmare

 Tuesday 11th to Thursday 13th

Our final morning at Tulia was spoilt somewhat and the next few days were a nightmare.  All because of a mistake I made several months ago and an assumption of how I would fix it.

When applying for our Uganda visa I put Tracy's Passport Number on my application.  I didn't realise until I went to complete her application and it wouldn't accept her passport number because it had already been used. No matter I thought,  mine will get rejected and I can start again. Well my application was approved. I didn't want to put in an application for Tracy using my passport number as that didn't seem right. I did some research and decided to sort it out using a Visa on Arrival.

I found out on the morning of our departure from Tulia that they no longer do Visa on Arrival and we would need a valid visa to be allowed on the plane. Our Guide at Tulia said it would all be fine and he contacted a woman Jacky from the Tulia head office in Nairobi to help us out.

Meanwhile we cancelled our flight to Entebbe, contacted the tour company and found a reasonably priced hotel near the airport. We holed up for the next few days as we needed wi-fi to use WhatsApp, fortunately there was an on-site restaurant that we frequented.

Over the next few days Jacky was very helpful, but sometimes that help was dubious to say the least. At one point she suggested flying to a regional airport where one of her colleagues would pick us up and take us to the border where they would 'help' us across the border and then drive us to Kampala. All of this for 'only' $900 USD ($300 of which was for the border guards). We said an absolute "no" to this option.

She then suggested that paying $300USD would speed the whole thing up. Trace was dubious but I agreed and we paid a shady dude who turned up on a motorbike. She then  promised the visas would be delivered by 'the end of the day' and I stayed up until midnight waiting for an email that didn't arrive. I then set an alarm for 4:00 in the vague hope that if the visa came we could get the 7:00am flight.  No deal.

I contacted Jacky in the morning and expressed my frustration. She seemed surprised that the emails didn't come and promised to look into it. By this time I had put in an application for Tracy using my passport number and there was talk of the Immigration Office doing something in the back-end to swap our passport numbers. Ultimately the solution was simple and something I am still kicking myself about.  Even though my application had been approved I could cancel it online, allowing for a new application for me and an update to Tracy's, entering correct passport numbers.

Jacky was instrumental in pushing these new/updated applications through within a few hours rather than the standard 4 days.  As I said, some of her advice was dubious and no doubt she was being fed rubbish by the Ugandan Immigration staff but ultimately I don't think we would have got the visas without her assistance.
After all of that we are booked on a flight Friday morning at 6:45 and will then be driven about 7-8 hours to join our tour. We will have missed the first half, but several of those days are transport days only. We are disappointed to have missed the Chimpanzee trek, but will do the Gorillas, which was always the main point of doing this tour.