I had my flight from Kochi to Melbourne on 27th Aug, 2016. The Mumbai – Kochi wasn’t booked because I hadn’t gotten my visa yet. It was already 25th Aug. Then on 26th Aug morning I received The Email – with my visa. 🙂

So all is happy and a LOT of last minute packing took place. It was not a good day I must say, because I got stuck in a traffic jam for 3 hours. Yea, the universe has been trying to tell me something.

Now when I relax at my AirBnb home in Melbourne, having delayed my cycling road trip due to cold and flu – I am slowly unraveling the universe’s message or at least trying to piece it together. It seems to be ‘Relax, All iz well’ 😉

It sometimes takes a bout of illness to know that all is indeed fine. But I am rambling too much.

Here is the know how about the Australian visa,

1) 15 working days – you have to plan that it will take 15 WORKING days to process your visa FROM the time the application reaches the New Delhi high office. It does not get counted from the day you applied at the VFS centre. Since I am from Mumbai, the applications where at New Delhi the next day itself. But if you are in another city then possibly it may take a few more days. Otherwise you will be like me waiting for the last day to get the visa or risk missing your flight. If you think about it, it is a very long time because counting weekends this becomes over 20 days. And there may also be some holidays in the middle, so apply for your Australian visa a month in advance.

Check for relevant time line for whichever visa you apply for here

I got my visa on the 11th working day #phew

2) Now for the good side – it is an e-visa! So your passport doesn’t get taken away for all the 20 days they need to process your visa. And of course there is no further delay in them sending back the passport and you collecting it.

3) assets: the other difference from the schengen visa is that you can show your assets in India. For eg: maybe you aren’t earning a great salary in India but you own a property or have saved up in an investment, so you can show these in your visa application. This way they can gauge whether you have ample reason to come back to India.

I found this missing in the schengen rules because many countries clearly said no property or asset documents will be considered. But why not? I often wonder I mean most of us don’t have lakhs lying around in the account it is usually in some investment form like FD or mutual fund ….

Apart from these three differences most of the stuff remains the same. Fundamentally you need to assure them of two things,

– you would want to come back once you travel there – so proof of life here like job, family, asset

– you can afford a basic decent lifestyle there and not do something criminal so show of itinerary, and intent etc..

You can refer to my previous blog about the schengen visa, that has tips on showing your itinerary and so on. Lot of it applies here as well.

Some specs,

I applied for 47 days of visa & large chunk of my itinerary was solo cycling & camping. Similar to the time I applied to Germany last year. Have shared more on that in the previous blog I just referred. Cost was about 10k. I got the visa on the 11th working day.

I got a one year multiple entry visa. 🙂