KSA to KW – Al Khafji to Al Nuwaiseeb Border Crossing

Another drive-through border with a few strange things which are becoming even more common nowadays like retina scans and stuff on top of your fingerprints and photos.

When you arrive at the border there are a few no stops you just drive into the main area and start following the process.

Out step 3 you hand over your car registration and driver’s passport and they give you a gate pass there’s quite a few passes and slips given within this process at this border that are handed over and back and sometimes kept by the officials.

This border they seem to get most things correct on the vehicle details like the registration and chassis number and didn’t make many errors.

The slip above is one of many for this border. Some of them you get in KSA and end up handing over in Kuwait.

There are two of the above slips for us and if you have four passengers you just get for there’s one for each passenger simply put.

No sooner than you are given a slip you are handing back over to the next booth.

You’re out of Saudi Arabia and now going on your way to Kuwait.

Obviously this is one of the big things about this border we didn’t bother doing the Evisa as we knew that they did Visa on arrival when you arrive at this first window in step 7 just telling them need to do visa on arrival and he will send you to the blue building on the left.

Park front of the building on the left and go inside to the windows slightly to the left.

Within this process there are three areas. The windows to the left, the one directly in front of the door and the small office to the right of the door.

We went to the window on the left and he sent us to the window on the right where one of the minions handed us a form that we needed to complete in biro/ink.

Once we completed the form we went back to the window on the left. We handed over the completed form and our passports. He entered loads of stuff on the computer and handed us back a blue visa paper.

We took this blue visa paper to the office on the right where they took fingerprints iris retina scans and photographs.

Once they had completed our identity capture they handed us back the blue visa form and we went to the window in front of the door for them to photocopy everything. The minion still had our passports from the first step and at this point the original form that we filled out in biro,  the now “completed” visa form and passports were photocopied.

At the end of all this he’s stamped the visa and we could leave.

You do not need to go back to the original entry gate/booth where they told us to go to the office. I was unsure about this and went back to the booth to ask.

One strange thing about this is that we never paid anything for the visa. The charge, we were told, is 3 KWD which in itself is quite cheap. We are United Kingdom and nobody asked for money and they gave us 30 days for nothing. There was no mention of money at all and this may have been because we are British or it might have been because it’s Ramadan. Sometimes the governments do strange things like this that Ramadan we have been told but we have no idea why it was free.

The free visa was more than made up for by the excessively over expensive insurance charge.

The price of the insurance is horrendous and make sure that they put you down as private vehicle they actually firstly charged us as a commercial truck.

If you have a document official or otherwise that says the word private on it this is the main piece of evidence you need to convince them that any vehicle that you are driving is classed as a car and not as a truck.

As it turns out when you are going through the process getting slips from the little booths one of them in fact said private on it in Arabic and was given by their own officials so this could be a key piece of paperwork if you don’t have anything from your home country that’s says private.

I’ve given an example of this below so keep your eye out for this piece of paper and take a photograph of it. It’s the slip received in step 9 which you probably still have up to this point as I think you hand it over when you leave at the final gate.