So, this is the last day before the adventure starts! We launch tomorrow morning, heading to the Czechout party in Prague. The mission for today was to get the notarised authorisation so that we all can drive the car. Zsolt and myself got up at 7 and hit the town to sort this out. It turned out to be a huge task.
We drove to the Hungarian “autoklub”, where a very helpful lady gave us the official authorisation form. It lists the car’s and owner’s details and the details of the other person who shall be authorised to drive. Then this gets a nice signature and “autoklub” stamp. Then it turned out that using this form you can only authorise a Hungarian citizen. For people with foreign passports like myself they won’t give us the stamp. Damn! We got the paper for Eslie but not for me. Reminding them about valid EU legislation didn’t help either.
So we went with the other possibility: write a letter of authorisation for the car and have Zsolt’s signature on it notarised by a notary. The first notary was on vacation. The second notary had lunch break between 11am and 1pm. What a lunch break! Are they eating five-course lunches?
At the third attempt, we got a notary appointment for 2pm. So after another long wait, we finally got this paper done.
However the paper will only be useful at the border if we can also produce a notarised translation into Russian. Getting this sorted in Budapest proved to be impossible on one day. So I spent a few hours on the internet, found a translation office, sent them the scans of the documents by mail, paid, and agreed they will deliver the notified translation into Russian to Volgograd, where we can pick it up at the post office. (Volgograd is the only really big Russian city along our route). Let’s see if this all works out… and hopefully we won’t need any of the papers anyway because we will succeed in getting Zsolt a visa. The Russian Embassy in Ashgabat (capital of Turkmenistan) said something about issuing visas for non-Turkmen residents as well, so that’s where we will try first.
After having spent literally the whole day for all this notary paperwork stuff, we packed everything for the big day tomorrow and went to sleep totally knackered. Here’s Zsolt packing (note the two red 20L jerry cans):
Eslie will pick us up with the car tomorrow at 6am, and then we’ll head to Prague.
I’m excited!