Armenia vs Azerbaijan: visa policy

View on the Georgian-Armenian border from Georgia's side

Georgian-Armenian border, 13:05, 20 July, 2009

It is now more than 1,5 hours we are standing in a line on the Georgian-Armenian border, Sadakhlo check-point. The line is not moving, and we – passengers – even started to think that the border guards are having a lunch time or maybe even a day off. It is hot. The driver put on Russian pop music, and I even managed to recognize one Azeri ‘chanson’ music performed in Russian. Bearing in mind the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, it is rather weird to hear this song on the border. The last time I crossed this part of the border two years ago, when Georgian border check-point was just a shack. Now it is a two-story building with  modern equipment and infrastructure.

Besides Armenians, who are going back home, I travel with one Slovenian and three Polish tourists, who first arrived to Georgia, made a tour around the country and then decided to visit Armenia, because it is rather easy to obtain a visa on the border. After the August war last year there are not so many tourists coming to Georgia, mainly people from Eastern Europe and the US, the majority of whom are young people, students. It is interesting to note here that these young people after visiting Georgia chose Armenia, not Azerbaijan. The reason of this choice is rather simple – in order to enter Azerbaijan, you should get a tourist visa or have an invitation from your friend, Azerbaijani citizen. After my visit to the consular section of the Embassy of Azerbaijan in Tbilisi, I was told that in order to get a visa, I should have an invitation. Asked, whether it is possible to obtain a tourist visa via travel agency, the man with whom I had spoken, alluded that in that case the procedure of obtaining visa will be more difficult and longer. Therefore I decided first to visit Armenia and then to go to Azerbaijan, when I get an invitation from my friend.

It is not a secret that tourists get two different narratives about Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, when visiting Azerbaijan and Armenia. Therefore more foreign tourists visit your country, more people hear your ‘narrative’ and side with you. Young scholars, future diplomats and opinion makers are among them. But the current trend is that most of the tourists coming to Georgia choose to visit Yerevan if time allows.  And as I have mentioned previously, the reason is the visa policy. Young people do not want to pay 60 EUR per visa or wait for an invitation to enter Azerbaijan.

I have just asked a Slovenian guy, whether he has plans to visit Azerbaijan. He’s saying that it is too expensive for him. He has no friends there to send him an invitation, but a travel agency in Tbilisi has asked for additional 75 EUR to make all the necessary arrangements for a visa. Add 60 EUR to this sum and you will get 135 EUR a tourist had to pay in total just to enter the country. Meanwhile, Armenian visa for 21 days during the tourist season costs only 10 USD or 7 EUR and you can get it easily on the border, even if you are a tourist-backpacker, who did not book any hotel beforehand.

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Yerevan, 22 July, 2009

I have just got a letter from my friend with a copy of the invitation, which has been sent to the Azerbaijani embassy in Riga, not Tbilisi. In the letter case it would have taken them more days to make an invitation. I do hope that the consul will understand the complexity of the situation and issue me a visa, so I can travel to Azerbaijan.