Prepare before you land

Harry’s border crossings go well or badly for a reason he thinks is boringly mechanical: what you did before you got there. Nothing about the approach is clever. It is having the visa approved in advance, the cash counted, the documents printed on paper, and the address of where you are staying written down — and then being early, both to the airport and off the plane.

The part people underestimate is the airline, not the border. A visa can be approved and still cost you ninety minutes at check-in while a desk agent verifies it, because the carrier is liable if it flies you somewhere you cannot enter. That is time you have to have budgeted, and it happens before any immigration officer has seen you.

How Harry applies it

• Do the visa at home, and know how long it takes. Pakistan issues no visa on arrival at all, so there is no fallback — Harry’s took about five days, Mac’s American passport about ten.
• Get to the airport very early when you are flying somewhere that needs a visa. This is the one he states as a rule, and he states it after nearly missing the flight.
• Have it on paper. Printed documents and counted cash, so nothing depends on a phone, a signal or a card working.
• Be first off the plane. The queue is the whole cost of immigration in most places, and it forms in the order people leave the aircraft.

The payoff is visible in the contrast: five minutes through immigration in Maputo, the smoothest he had had in Africa, and a quick friendly entry to Karachi at 3am — with the only real trouble of either trip happening at a check-in desk in Amman.

Demonstrated in

• Madness in Mozambique’s Maputo! 🇲🇿 — through Maputo immigration in five minutes, which he credits directly to visa approval online, cash ready, documents printed and being first off the plane.
• UK tourist travels to KARACHI, PAKISTAN 🇵🇰 — no visa on arrival for Pakistan, both visas applied for days ahead, and ninety minutes lost at check-in anyway.