Schengen Visa to Hades

The Dirty Blonde returned to Paris last week.

- TROVATO

She had been threatening to stay for another six months unless I promised to join her.

She assumed I was lying and refused to go home until I applied for a visa and bought an air ticket. I'd suffered the pain of getting a Schengen visa a year ago, but that was when I was living in Cape Town. In Durban, everything is slower and harder to accomplish. You need more fortitude, patience and alcohol to get anything done.

Applying for a Schengen visa is much like applying for a tender. To stand a chance of getting either, you have to use a middleman who deals with the paperwork and takes a cut. In this case, a company called Capago.

They are the equivalent of, say, the construction mafia. You can't get anywhere without their approval. You submit all your documentation to them, including your passport, and they allegedly scrutinise it to make sure everything is in order before sending it off to the embassy or consulate of whichever European country you're landing in.

The total cost is around R5 000, with the option of the special deluxe premium package that comes with free coffee and muffins for just R1 600. I signed up for that in Cape Town. When I arrived for my appointment, they could find no record of the documents I'd uploaded so they had to do it all again while I sat there.

I waddled out of their fancy offices, half-man, half-muffin and a couple of weeks later, I got my passport back with a Schengen visa attached.

The Capago people in Durban don't even have a proper office. It's a cramped, rented space and once a month or so, a small team flies in from Joburg to process the applications. I only discovered this after paying the full fee plus the extra for unlimited muffins.