Vehicle Paperwork

Carnet

Not the camping kind but vehicle carnets. It is basically a promise that you won't dump your rusty heap of scrap in their country. It's a pretty solid promise on your part because you either coughed up a bond equal to several times the market value of your car or you have paid some kind of insurance policy.

There are a few kinds but they all follow the same basic principle. You have three documents per-carnet "page". When you enter a country, you get stamps and signatures and whatever on all three but the bottom one is torn off and kept by the customs guys. When you leave the country the remaining two are stamped and signed and the second document is torn off.

We now have the situation where the country in question has evidence you brought your vehicle into the country and that you took it back out. You have evidence of both as well so that if there is any paperwork lost at either border you can point at your stamped and signed copies. Nobody has any complaints.

FIA Carnets

Yes, FIA as in Formula 1.

A whole heap of countries' automobile associations have gotten together an agreed on a carnet system where the bond is posted in your home country and you get a yellow booklet of stamps which are managed as you travel through countries on your trip.

You'll see all the truck drivers thrusting them through customs official's windows with disdain on both parts.

If a country you're going through uses this system then you must have these carnets or you must be prepared to drop the equivalent amount of hard currency into the hands of the local customs officials and hope that there's a similar amount waiting for you when you leave.

The costs of the carnet can be quite high. Egypt is easily the worst and want a bond to the tune of 800% of the value of your vehicle. Ouch!

In the UK, we have to go through the RAC. You have the choice of coughing up the full bond or you can buy some insurance to cover the bond with a slight complication. You actually pay twice the real cost but will be refunded half your money when you send the collection of double-stamped carnet documents back to them.

Other Multi-country Carnets

The West African countries have their own multi-country carnet system. I don't know much about it. I guess it works pretty much like the FIA system.

Per-country Carnets

Most countries, however, operate a temporary carnet system. That is you purchase at the border a carnet that lasts for several weeks or months for waves finger in wind $50.

Warning

Having the paperwork that says you removed the vehicle from a country is only of any use to you if you still have it to prove your point when you return through a country. So don't go tossing that document to the breeze asap.

I'm not sure what you can do, if anything, vis-a-vis the FIA carnets which you have to return to the RAC to get your money back. Presumably, as it's a big international system, if a country has lost some paperwork and is bitching that you've dumped the vehicle in their country on a previous visit (despite having clearly just arrived in/on it from another) you'll have to get them to phone the RAC and they can rummage through their records.

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