THE HARDEST COUNTRIES TO VISIT - from my journey to every country

I'm Sal Ivalo and I've been to every country in the world and I promise it's really not easy so today I'm gonna share some of the stories of the hardest countries for me to get into and let's start with Burundi Burundi should be easy you can just fly into it but I love to travel overland so I was in Tanzania I wanted to get on the bus and go to Burundi 24 hours later I was nowhere near Burundi so I asked one of the passengers like how far is it to brendi they said Oh didn't they tell you it's a forty hour bus ride and they had not and so I get to the border maybe you know 36 hours into it and I need a visa but you can get the visa on arrival but they wouldn't accept dollars they wouldn't accept Tanzanian currency and they wouldn't exchange anything for me so I was stranded there in this big bus no way to get into the country because it's weird rule of the currency I ended up having to like ask for help from everybody on the bus which is kind of embarrassing you know like this young white tourist asking all these people travelling 40 hours by bus to pay for his visa to enter into their country but luckily people were really nice it so I finally after 40 long hours an hour to spent freaking out at the border I finally got into the country which ended up being one of the most beautiful places I've ever been and somewhere I really want to go back to that's sucked that was it like like I'm smiling but that's really exhausted when you're 20 years old and you're you're stuck at a border and the is my first time in Africa and it's hard to get into a place number two South Tomei so some places are visa-free they're safe they're cheap to go to but they just don't have enough flights out o May is like that the only flights you can really booked online are ones that are coming in from Europe to get there from other countries in Africa I was traveling from Equatorial Guinea you need to like email the small airline directly you have to hope they're gonna send you it you have to send them a bank transfer they ended up like 50% more than it actually cost I didn't find out till I got to the airport they printed out my ticket and it had the price of the ticket on it so I called the guy and I say why does the price of the ticket that I was given is like half the price of what I paid you and he said oh you know somebody didn't pay me last month so I thought maybe you could pay for him and yourself which is not very nice but in any case I got to Sam Tomac number three Belarus the only country in Europe that it was difficult to get to Belarus has a weird visa regime they've actually changed it to now being visa on arrival if you go to the airport again I wasn't flying into the airport I was already in Europe and I wanted to to go over by train and bus so I entered from Poland into this forest region which if you apply in advance you can go get your visa at the border but to get from the small town in Poland to the forest in Belarus I have rented bicycle and I had a like drive or riding my bike for an hour I get to the forest I spent three days in this beautiful forest and the small little like cottage hotel but it was a fun and like a weird experience to cross a border by bicycle and by foot do volu and now rue so these are small islands they both only have 10,000 people there's not a lot of flights that go there they don't go very often they're not that reliable and they're pretty expensive so the one hour round trip like the two blues like $800 to get from Australia to now Roos like $1,000 you can do it but you know it it takes a little bit of time a lot of planning but just in terms of logistics trying to plan a trip try and find out how to get there to move is one of the hardest countries to get to I wanted to enter by land through Ethiopia by bus and to do that I had to get a visa get used the entries like certificate to get a visa at an embassy which I tried to do in the UAE but you can only do that if you're resident in that country so I had to convince the Consul General that even though resident I already had the form so if you should give it to me very complicated very expensive actually but they ended up giving it to me I'm then in Ethiopia trying to get into Sudan by bus from Addis Ababa to Gondar and then I cross over and that border is not a place that I would wish upon anybody it is like eight different offices that you have to go through only five of them are like actual government offices a few of them are just guys who are set up trying to make money on either side of the border but you don't know who's real nobody has real uniforms it's really complicated once you get into the country then for Sudan you have to get permits to travel outside of Khartoum and your visa actually only allows you to go to Khartoum but because I've entered by Road I was technically immediately illegally there because I didn't have a permit to be in the eastern part of the country and so luckily I got to Khartoum without like being questioned too much number six is Guinea so I was in Guinea Bissau and I wanted to get to Conakry in Guinea I was going by Road it seems to be kind of a trend right me having problems because I go by Road and I went it ended up taking like 30 hours in four different cars all on dirt roads to get from Bissau into Conakry and it's one of these like SUVs but they'll have maybe seven seats but to put twelve people in it I because I'm a foreigner they luckily put me in the front but you still have to share the front seat with somebody else super bumpy you get to the border and it's just a small little building on on a dirt road and everybody has to get their stamps even though I had a visa before there's a question of whether I could enter or not but anyway I ended up getting there getting in but there's a long process exhausting and not super comfortable the road between waka Doo goo Burkina Faso and Neil mania is one of the spots where al Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb Aachen is most present but least active so we know that they're there they've said that they're gonna do stuff but they haven't really done that much so it's a it's considered dangerous so I said okay if I leave in the morning I can get to taniyama in the daylight in public transport I'll be fine however when I woke up and tried to go to get the bus it was pouring them rain there was no taxis there's a huge storm with trees all everywhere on the road I finally got a taxi I get to the bus station but the bus had left so instead of waiting a day like I should have done I decided that I would take smaller buses in sequence so from one city to the next to the next and I had to take three different buses to get there it was supposed to be a total of nine hours which would still get me there in the daylight which I thought would be safer but it ended up having I ended up having to wait for three hours for the first bus to fill up with enough people who wanted to go to the next city when I arrived in the next city it was already like early afternoon and I still had a minimum of six hours to go I was really nervous and I didn't want to stay in this like small village and this in this like dangerous part of the country and so I asked if there's any buses that were going to the next city and they said that they were finished for the day I with the help of a really nice Peace Corps volunteer who was able to translate for me agreed with one of the drivers that I would rent the entire bus pay the full fare and if we picked up anybody else as we went along they would pay me rather than him so that my fare would be decreased sound like a good plan so off we went it ended up taking more than three hours because we were stopping picking up people and all of this like craziness and I ended up getting to the border which was the spot where the second bus was gonna end when I was already close to midnight already dark the border is another place that you really don't want to stay you know there's not it's mostly traders and people like looking to cross over and it's not a place you really want to spend time so they made arrangements with the third bus guy who would take me from the border to the Capital another 3-4 hours but they would only go on this route if I hired like a mini militia or like a group of armed guys to protect me but when you're you know 24 years old in there 25 years old in the back of a bus with guys with machetes and guns like you're not sure if they're protecting you or if they're you know planning to harm you and I don't speak the same language as these guys they um you know had just been translated through these other people for me so I was really afraid and you know we went to four or five hours that we crossed the border and I made it and it was totally fine and these guys were there and they were trying to help me and I think what I learned from that experience you shouldn't be afraid of something before it happens you should take all the precautions in order to avoid any violence avoid anything bad happening but don't be afraid that something will happen you know I spent that entire car trip just freaking out like being so nervous about where I was whereas really I should have been appreciating it the it was the most beautiful sky that I had ever seen in the middle of the Sahel ian's desert you know with more stars than I've ever seen my entire life and I did see that I do remember and I appreciated that but mostly what I remember from that time is being afraid and that was a useless fear because it was misplaced nothing happened Yemen I went to Yemen in November 2017 it wasn't a good time to go to Yemen I don't recommend anybody going to Yemen now or then I ended up going like with a local person who ended up not being very kind and like took advantage a little bit of me and but luckily you know I'm here and it's fine don't go to Yemen I don't recommend it but it was definitely one the hardest countries to get into you know I entered at the border with Oman then we drove for a couple days into the country when I realized it wasn't a good situation with this guy I ended up turning around and leaving I don't like really like thinking about the details so I'm not gonna go into them you know I'd rather go back at another time when things are more stable and with somebody that I like trusts a little bit more the absolute hardest country for me to get to was Ivory Coast again it's a place that's easy if you fly into but I didn't do that I tried a couple times to get in by land and it was very difficult so I was in Liberia I had gotten my visa in Senegal and I had traveled by public transport all the way down the coast and I wanted to get into into Ivory Coast and about a few hundred kilometers or a couple of 100 kilometers away from the border I was asking to get into a new bus or a taxi they said there aren't any we can only go on this road on the back of a guy's motorcycle so that's a little bit scary too you know being the bush on a dirt road on the back of the strangers motorcycle in the middle of West Africa but that was the way to get there so we go we kind of become friends in the five hour drive and we get to the border and this was in April 2016 so Ebola had finished all these countries were clear of it and there had been a government announcement that the border had reopened because it was closed during Ebola to kind of prevent the spread of it we get to the border I give them my passport and they say oh you're not allowed to go if you're American or if you're from anywhere other than Liberia or Cote d'Ivoire and they asked why and they said oh it's because of Ebola and the border is closed and I said that's not true you know the government announced a few weeks ago that the border is open again and he said but we didn't get that memo I was like but you know like right it's in the news you know that this is open he's like yeah we know that they said that but nobody has yet sent us the official form to open the border so you're not allowed to go unless you're from one of these two countries so super frustrated I had to get back on the back of the motorcycle and strategized the guy said he's like oh maybe I can like sneak you in through the forest and I had to convince him but that wasn't a good idea at all and so then we went to the Guinean border luckily I had a double entry visa to Guinea so I could go back into Guinea through the forest region border entrance and then we tried to go over into the more northern part of Ivory Coast we get to the border there and it's the exact opposite situation of the day before there they say that the day before there had been a shootout between a militia of rebels and the Ivorian military so the Guinean army is not allowing any Guineans to cross the border because they think it's dangerous but they said you're not Guinean so if you want to go you can go if you would like I uh know that if the Guinean army isn't letting guineans cross and I probably shouldn't cross myself but this was like towards the end of my trip I realized that I wasn't going to be able to go to Ivory Coast now and I ended up just spending like ten days in the forest region in Guinea in in Zurich or a this likes small city and end up being this amazing experience and about five months later I was in Ghana and I was able to cross the border and get to Abidjan and have like a few days in Ivory Coast but I didn't yet get to see like that western part of the country that I wanted to see by entering from by entering from Liberia it's like scary actually like when I think about these it's like it wasn't there not like fun memories to think about all of them you

Channel: Sal Lavallo

Views: 173,148

Rating: 4.858912 out of 5

Keywords: hardest countries to visit, hardest visas to get, most difficult countries to visit, visit every country, travel, traveler, see the world, around the world, burundi, sao tome, belarus, tuvalu, nauru, sudan, guinea, guinea-bissau, burkina faso, niger, yemen, ivory coast, liberia, overland travel, sal lavallo

Id: l68Wk3oWY8k

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 31 2018