Although I have traveled quite a few number of times to foreign lands, the usual paperwork has always been handled by someone else. So when I got invited to a FAM trip by Tourism Selangor and I had to do all the visa paperwork by myself, I was in a quandary. My first response was to get in touch with my co-bloggers to know their status. Jyotsna from Wander with Jo was the first person I called up. As she already had visited Malaysia before, she had a Visa with 6 months validity. She also told me about the eVisa which can be applied online but has a lesser validity of 15 days with multiple entry. With all the information in hand, I braced myself for the challenge.
Malaysian Visa Services and eVisa
The first thing I ventured out was filling up the eVisa form but I could not go ahead as Malindo Air hadn’t given us our tickets yet. The next call I made was to the Malaysian Visa Services. The Malaysian Visa services offer you a multiple entry 6 month visa for about INR 5000. Following are the documents that you’ll need to submit for the same.
- Passport
- Return Ticket
- 2 Visa photographs
I, on the other hand had planned to submit the documents for the eVisa and that’s when Manjulika Pramod of Pendown told me about the eNTRI visa. Although Malaysia Tourism had done an event regarding the same in Le Meridien this year at SATTE, I had totally forgotten about it. The eNTRI pass offers you a single entry 15 day visa with a 3 month cool off period (means you cannot apply for the same in the next 3 months). One of the main reasons I applied for this visa was because I was going on an one off trip without any plans for the future. Secondly the time taken for this visa is virtually negligibly. I’ll tell you some of the tips for a smooth arrival of your eNTRI visa.
eNTRI Note
The first page of the visa document takes care of your basic personal details including your Passport number and you also have to enter PDF files of all the documents that you have.
The second page is probably the most important. Your have to resize your photograph properly to fit within the smaller box inside. The photograph that my photographer has given me was not correct. I used this website Visa Photo to get myself the correct sized and coloured visa photograph. They charged INR 299 for creating the photograph which I personally thought was a bit on the expensive side.
The last page is where you do the $21.50 (INR 1300) payment and voila, your visa is done.
I had quite an easy time going through immigration in both India and Malaysia with the eNTRI visa. You should also try out the same.
