Feb 5, 2008
Section 47, Paragraph 7 of Council Order Number 438476
At work today we got this email:
It has come to our attention that Immigration in South Africa will no longer admit anyone into the country that does not have two blank passport pages facing one another in their passport. They do not consider the last two pages in the passports as legal places where they can affix their stamps. This is simply not negotiable; they will send you back and fine the airline in the process.
So.. what the hell is that about? Is this really a concern?
It strikes me that this doesn’t scale particularly well. A passport doesn’t have that many facing pages.
Possibly the SA entry visa is one of these overblown full-page monsters and then they entry stamp the facing page (HK resident visas were sort of like that when I lived there), but it’s not very traveller friendly.
They had that requirement for China a few months ago. I *had* two facing pages, and they used up one for the full-page visa (a beautiful thing with the Great Wall, I may add). The tiny entry stamp went somewhere else; they didn’t actually use both facing pages. Go figure.
This is not unusual. Most countries will not issue visas in cases where there are less than 2 or 4 pages left in a passport. Brad and I felt very, um, wordly earlier this year when we had to send our passports off for additional pages.