Preparing for Oz

I know you've all been waiting for the Australia series, so here it goes...

I should start by mentioning why we ended up in Australia in the first place.  The excuse was my great aunt's 90th birthday (Dad's mom's sister).  When I was home last October, my dad mentioned that he would be going to Australia for a week in December for this birthday party/family reunion.  It tied in perfectly with the week he would spend in Hong Kong for work.  He also mentioned that he was bringing my brother. 

At this time Carlos and I were still planning our belated honeymoon and had finally decided on going to Colombia around the same time.  My dad then remarked that his brothers would be there too, plus some other cousins would be there as well.  I made the comment that it sounded like a bit of a boys bash, when I was given the offer that I couldn't refuse - come to Australia for your honeymoon instead of Colombia.  Spend a week with family, then a week on your own.

When I returned to Ecuador Carlos and I discussed the offer and we decided we would go to Australia - but only if he could get a visa in time.  My visa would take 30 seconds to process, his would take 30 days.  So we started on the paper work.  We needed a letter of invitation, proof of employment, proof of funding, proof of insurance, marriage certificates, bank statements, a sworn statement saying that the didn't have TB and hadn't been convicted of a felony, names, addresses and birth dates of family and friends in Australia, etc. (at this point I was surprised they didn't ask us for our first born, however, all of this was still less paperwork than I had needed for my naturalization process).  And we needed to send all of it to the closest embassy - Chile. 

We were told that it takes around 20 business days to process and when it was sent we had 21 business days prior to our proposed departure date.  We knew we would be cutting it close so we didn't book anything except for our fully refundable overseas flights.  While I don't mind traveling without plans in a developing country, I was terrified of doing the same in a Australia, especially during high season.

If you want to learn about how US government institutions work, the first thing you need to to is leave the US.  When you are abroad you suddenly find out everything.  Or maybe you just find out that you need to know everything.  Did you know that to send a package from Ecuador to Chile via DHL it goes through the US?  And did you know that US Customs confiscates passports that are not being sent to or from an embassy?  Did you know that we needed to sign a form provided by DHL saying that they were not responsible if Carlos's passport got confiscated by US Customs (even though it was clearly being sent to and from an embassy)? 

So we waited.  And waited.  And finally, after about five or six business days from when the package was sent (not quite sure because there were two days of holidays here and one, maybe two in Chile at the beginning of November) and one business day after it had arrived (I'm impatient), I urged Carlos to call the embassy to make sure that they got the passport (the package was signed for on a Friday afternoon) and check on how the process was going and if they needed more info.  Astonishingly, they told him that the visa was approved and his passport was going to be sent back that day (which still meant another week before the passport was in our hands). 

So only about two weeks before our departure we were able to relax about the visa and start planning the rest of our itinerary.