BATTLING BUREAUCRACY

Garry Marchant
gmarchant@questbay.com
24th April 2001

It took longer to buy the tickets than to cross the sub-continent by train. Some years ago, my wife and I flew into Bombay, planning to go south to Madras the next day. The Bombay railway station was a nightmare scene of endless line-ups, milling crowds, utter chaos.

Finding the appropriate queue, we waited. Hours later, we reached the wicket, where a scrawny, supercilious clerk informed us that all seats to Madras were booked for the next few weeks. It was the holiday season, you see. He let us suffer with this information, then suggested we try another line where, for some reason, they might have a few tickets left. We lined up again. And waited. And waited.

For nearly three days we shuttled from line to line, station to station, office to office. There were allocations for student tickets, but these, too, were sold out. The Indian Department of Tourism had some seats reserved for foreign visitors, but we needed written permission from the head office on the other side of the city to obtain these.

Late one afternoon, our pursuit of the tickets took us to a dreary office in the back of the station, where sluggish ceiling fans barely stirred the dust on bundles of yellowing paper piled high on every desk, table and chair of the musty room. We were directed from desk to desk until we finally cornered the proper clerk and explained our needs. He looked nervously around for an escape, then grabbed a square of blank pulp paper hanging on a string from a desk like pieces of newspaper on an outhouse wall "Fill out this form," he instructed.

Problems with officialdom can be the bane of independent travelers straying away from tourist circuits. Away from central airports, they are at the mercy of often illiterate officials, such as heavily armed, surly border guards who carefully study passports - upside down.

One of my battered old passports has a visa from a Middle East country, issued in Beirut. The consul stamped the visa, then printed, in large capital letters, GARRY MICHAEL MAR. He got to the edge of the page and quit, simply truncating my surname. Despite my apprehensions, the visa got us into the country.

Red tape is an intrinsic aspect of some cultures. When I lived in Brazil, it was so wrapped up in regulations that professionals who specialized in cutting through red tape - known as despechantes - thrived. While tourists had no trouble visiting the country, there could be snags. Many years ago a friend got a six month visa to visit her parents working in Sao Paulo.

When she tried to return to Canada after four months in Brazil, she was told she had to stay the whole six. A despechante worked out the p Bureaucratic excesses occasionally degenerate into the comedy of the absurd. Many years ago, en route from Jakarta to Kuching, Sarawak, we stopped to visit Indonesian Borneo. On arrival in Pontianak, we had to register with a uniformed official in the airport. When we checked in that afternoon to confirm our onward flight, they gave us a list of three more offices to register with before we could leave the country.

For the rest of our time in Pontianak, we travelled from office to office by becak (bicycle rickshaw), cutting our way through the Indonesian acronymic jungle of KODAM and KODIM and KODMA and KOMAD. At the police station, an officer typed up our names on pink forms and duly registered us in a ledger. Over at the army office, three giggling girls could hardly restrain themselves as they, too, entered our name in a book.

At the internal security department headquarters uniformed helmeted soldiers escorted us into a room, saluted and left us with forms to fill. Finally, we were met a high ranking officer who asked, rather apologetically, if we were surprised to see all this red tape. We left his office with just enough time to get to the airport to catch the flight out. The only consolation was that it was pleasant riding around town in the becaks, and all of the officials were genuinely friendly and helpful. None of the The German-speaking Romanian consul in Prague many years ago was not such a slave to paperwork. We filled out visa applications in duplicate in the dim, mouldy anteroom of the embassy. Spotting the profession we had listed, the consul objected, "Nein, nichts journalistas," no journalists. Then he demanded, conspiratorially, "Haben sie geld?"

We allowed cautiously that we had a little money. Sizing us up, the suave shyster demanded a moderate sum, took our passports and reappeared five minutes later with visas. We left the embassy still clutching our application forms which he had neglected to take.

On the train out of Budapest a few days later, an American-Romanian, a Dracula scholar going to Transylvania to further his research, told us we didn't need visas to enter Romania. The wily dishonorable consul had fleeced us.

It is not advisable to try to bully your way past officialdom, although direct action worked for young American "hippy" I once met at a Middle Eastern border crossing. The guards wanted to take him into their customs shack to search him for drugs, but fearing they would rape him or plant drugs on him, he began to strip right there, in the open. He was soon on his way.

An obnoxious New York businessman was less successful leaving Nairobi airport with some left over Kenyan money. The customs official told him it was illegal to export local currency. Too busy, or lazy, to go back and change it, the man offered it to the official. Perhaps interpreting this as a bribe, the Kenyan refused indignantly. By now angry at this delay, the arrogant businessman tore up the notes and threw them at the official. He should be getting out of Kenya any year now.