On our Asian trip we are traveling to Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.  We received a notice from our cruise line yesterday (less than a week before we set off) that visas were required for our travel.  Thankfully I already knew that.

A travel visa is sometimes required when visiting a foreign country.  This is a document which allows you to legally enter and stay in a country for a specified amount of time.   Rules and length of stay vary by country.    There are many different kinds of visas.

A Transit Visa may be required even if you are just passing through one country to get to another country.  It will not matter if you are arriving by car, boat or plane.  These visas usually only allow from hours to days to make the transit.

Short Stay Visas, Tourist Visas and Travel Visas usually allow you to stay for about 90 days or less. These are common when you will be staying in the country for a period of time.  You may not work in the country you are visiting on most of these types of visas. Visas vary for different nationalities so be sure to check that too, if this is your situation. There are many other kinds of visas but the above two pertain most to travelers so these are the only ones I will mention on this blog.

I used www.ivisa.com to check which of the countries we would need to obtain visas for.  I required 4 but Alan only needs 3.   All will be a form of a transit visas, which can only be obtained a few days before our arrival at each destination.  While on a cruise, the ship often takes care of these,  because not all passengers have access to the internet while en-route so doing the 72 hour thing can be challenging.  A fee is often charged for the service and convenience.  As a result, we are now down to needing to procure just one visa for each of us and that is for Singapore.  We will register 72 hours before our arrival, nearly half of that will be spent just trying to get us there!, Let’s hope there will be no delays…so far we only have to worry about a war which is causing fuel to spike, TSA agents quitting after a government shutdown, which has the effect of long security lines and now a big weather system is due into town the night before we set off!  No worries,  because I can’t control any of this.  I did stock up on snacks today though, just in case we get stranded!