Yeaterday my wife and I were travelling by taxi from Oman to Dubai all went well until we tried to cross the border. It was her first trip into the UAE so they wanted to do an eye scan. Thats when the fun began apparently she had been in the country since 2014 and had overstayed her visa therfore she owed them many thousands of $ in fines. The problem was she had never been in the middle east in her life until 6 weeks ago. When iI pointed this to the higher ranking official who had finally arrived after a lot of waiting I too was given the third degree even though they had already stamped my passport. 3 hours later they finally let us in but it was real touch and go and they took a lot of convincing bfore they accepted she was not an illegial immigrant or something. To top it off one of my collegues who was also heading home got pulled up in Dubai airport because apparently he had already left the country by boat it didn,t matter that he was standing in front of them and didnt have a departure stamp. It would be funny but it,s not really a part of the world that you want to be trying to convince the authorities you are not breaking the law.
i,m sure that plenty of others have had experiences trying to cross foreign borders but I was under the impression that this retina scan technology was supposed to be the most advaced security system yet......I,m really looking forward to getting back to Australia where I can travel around again without having to go through all these hassles of crossing borders sometimes we don,t realise just how lucky we are.
cheers
BB
-- Edited by The Belmont Bear on Sunday 1st of April 2018 02:10:16 PM
Don't cross land borders in the Middle East or Africa if you can possibly avoid it.
And, in the above two, stay below the radar of "The Authorities" under all circumstances.
The is no habeas corpus there.
I spent 12 months working in South Africa in the mid nineties and another 12 months in Mozambique in 2003/4. Never had any major issues but sometimes it may have taken us 15 minutes and on other days 2 or 3 hours depending on how much they wanted to hassle you. Mozambique was the worst because we used to do our shopping over the border in either Swaziland or South Africa and they decided to put a limit of US$100 on how much you could bring back in before they would tax you. You can find lots of tricks like asking the cashier in the supermarket to stop half way and print you off the docket before putting the rest through. You wouldn.t believe how many hidy holes you can find for alcohol in some cars - it was always a battle of wits that once or twice we did actually lose. Money talks in the poorer 3rd world countries you could pay them off with a bribe that was worth only half of what the tax would have cost you and they would turn a blind eye. I dont know if things have changed since those days but all of the expats I was with did it for a year without experiencing any problems.
