Carnet - India
 

We will be leaving the UK in March 2011, planning to be in India end of July.
Does anyone know if we are able to leave the bikes in India while we fly back to UK for a wedding?, how will this affect the carnet?
I cannot find any info about this on the RAC website and don't want to bother Paul Gowen until we finalise our plans.

Any help would be appreciated.
Angie

It's possible, you need to leave the vehicle at the customs compound whilst you're out of the country.

Cheers
Pete

Yep - I'll second that, at least assuming you'll enter India through Wagah Customs and then immediately leave the vehicle there. They'll seal the vehicle in the compound. You might want to put a tarpaulin of some sort over the bike.

I assume you'll be travelling on a carnet prior to reaching India, thus this will be stamped out of Pakistan. Probably better if you tell the Indians on arrival that you don't have one, then leave the vehicle at Wagah while (as far as the Indians are concerned) you head off to get one. They are used to this - not sure what the reaction would be if you told them on arrival that you DO have a carnet but just want to take advantage of their free secure storage for a week or 2!

Then, you can come back to Wagah from your wedding and produce the current carnet and carry on as if you were entering from Pak there and then. It won't make any difference to the end date of the carnet, but obviously you'll have lost some of its validity.

I may not know anything... but I was in India with my Finnish bike on a carnet in 2007, and thought about leaving it there for Christmas for a week or two. In the end we stayed in India, and finally left at the same time as the bike, so I have no personal experience of how it would have worked.

However I don´t think they put any mention of the vehicle into my passport, when entering from Wagah. So if I´d just left it there at a hotel or somewhere, then went to the airport and bought tickets, would the "system" have alarmed them, that I have a vehicle in the country, and I cannot leave without it (I simply dont know)?

Is it specified in the carnet, that the owner must stay in the same country as the vehicle all the time? This is something I never really even thought about whilst on the trip, but I thought its primary objective is to prevent you from selling your vehicle in a carnet-country (......and sorry for putting more questions than answers here!!)

I was wondering about that myself, which was why I didn't write 'why leave the vehicle at Wagah - surely it would be easier to sign it in at Wagah and then leave it in the secure parking of whichever airport you want to fly out from, rather than all that to-ing and fro-ing'?

We left our 'carneted' vehicle in Jordan while we took a quick side-trip to Israel in 2007 and it wasn't picked up on. I know also that when I was getting the vehicle shipped out from Calcutta in early 2008, it caused a problem that it was being shipped out on a carnet when it was brought in on one by road (via Wagah). How much of that was genuine and how much was just the baksheesh-wallahs at Calcutta Customs raising it as a problem to extract ££ from us wasn't clear.

The difficulty with any kind of bureaucracy issue is that if you do things in a certain way/tell them a certain story, it can often be too late to undo them or untell them when it develops into a problem.

Of course it would be easier to sign in at Wagah and then leave the bike in the secure parking of the airport you're flying out from, but if you do this and then get to the passport desk and they look on their computer and say 'hang on - you entered this country in your own vehicle' , what are you going to do then?

In the absence of perfect information about whether they or will not will pick up on you leaving without your carneted vehicle, it may well be easier to play safe. Unless the RAC can shed any light?

Recent passage through Wagan
 

Hi,
I've just passed through the crossing last Saturday and think a mix of the solutions above would be helpfull.

The Pakistani Customs and Immigration was computerised, so would I think be somehow linked as you also need to present your passport and it's recorded by customs etc.

On the Indian side the Immigration is computerised but the Customs wasn't ( neither 2 other crossings into India ) so you would have a seperation between Immigration and Customs.

Parking at the airports should be easy enough but India isn't like other places so please make sure there is long-term parking wherever you hope to leave the vehicle, a friendly guest-house may be better !

I big hiccup may be the requirement for an exemption to re-enter India if you leave for less than 2 months, you need to personally visit the High Commission in the country you have gone to and plead a case to be allowed back. I needed to do this twice.

There is also the FRRO, Foriegner Registration requirement where Foriegners are required to register their location within 14 days of arrival into India, this is on top of all the other paperwork you do, this can take from 1/2 a day for me to 3 days for a friend !

Wishing you the best of luck and hope the info leads to usefull clues.

Frank.
Lahore.

You can leave it at any port in India it does need to be at Wagah/Atari, as long as there is customs your good to go.

Cheers
Pete

Thanks for all your comments and help.
I have tried to get my son to change the wedding date - but no luck. (Kids!!!!)

If we left the bikes at the boarder for 2 weeks how do we know they will be safe?!!
Our 2nd option is to do Turkey, Syria & Jordan then travel back to Europe and ride or fly back to UK in August.
Although this would give us peace of mind it would be September/October before we are in Iran/Pakistan.

Angie

Wagah Customs DEFINITELY has a secure ie fenced off storage area. I saw the other foreigners' uncarneted vehicles in there. I asked the customs guys about them, as one does, and he said a couple had been there "for months".