UAE to KSA – Al Ghuweifat to Al Batha Border Crossing

Quite a simple border really although it was quite stressful beforehand as we understood it was really difficult and it was actually quite painless. We did make a monumental mistake at the beginning and missed the turn off for the customs and stamping out the CdP.

All the Staff were friendly and helpful and a couple in particular helped us a lot as we messed up and missed the CdP stamp exiting UAE. In KSA it was slick and everyone knew exactly what we needed to do and sent us to the next bit. Can’t fault the process or staff in UAE or KSA. Super easy.

So first of all you need to turn off before you enter the border post and turn before the fence starts to the right. picture attached below.

Essentially follow the trucks passing a mosque on your right and continue until there is a small cabin (looks like it is on the other side of the fence but there is an entrance on this side) on the left hand side before the entrance the trucks go in. Do not follow the truck into the gates where the manned boxes are. Instead stop at the little cabin on the left. There is a hard standing in front and dirt parking to the right. Picture below.

Once inside the cabin hand over the CdP to the guy behind the glass. He probably won’t know what to do and in my case one of the agents or drivers told him where to stamp. There was a short wait but it was very quick.

Once that is finished drive back the way you came even if this means driving against traffic. The police told us this is all fine. The looks like it is one direction but it isn’t.

Once you are back at the fence you turn right into the main border compound. It’s a matter of going through the first gate which is raised by security then driving past everything else until you come to the main line of huts. Choose one of the lines of cars and wait your turn. It’s just a case of handing over your passports and waiting for the returned paper slip. This paper slip is very important. It is needed to go through the UAE border and the KSA border. For the paper slip they use your car registration for the “exit number” and in our case it was just 3 digits out of the whole thing. Picture below right at the bottom.

I can’t quite remember if we showed the slip on the final exit from UAE. We did pay a departure tax of 30.21 AED pp. By card.

Anyhow by the time we exited the whole thing we had a final insurance green stamp on this paper. There would be additional stamps all the way through this process both UAE and KSA. More on that later.

Immigration into KSA wasn’t that hard we didn’t do the Evisa before hand as I think I was on a scam web site and the price was wrong.  So we just opted, based on advice from the WhatsApp group, to go for visa on arrival which immigration called an emergency visa.

It was pretty much no hassle. So from start to finish we arrived at the immigration gate still sat within the car ( Drive Through) and explained to the lady in the booth that we needed a visa as we didn’t have an Evisa. She told us to go in the office/counter at the left of the gates (If I recall correctly they kept the gate pass and this was only returned once we had the visa and returned to the same booth).

We continued through and parked on the left.

We went into the office where there are couple of  Evisa kiosks. The conversation between the two people behind the desk seemed to indicate the kiosks did not work.

We were escorted to an office at the other end of the building where our visa was processed complete with fingerprints and photographs. This cost 480 SAR per person. SIMPLE!

Once you have the visa in your passport you are also given another small slip paper and this piece of paper is quite important as it contains your visa number (sic) if you don’t read Arabic numerals.

The number is actually officially called a “border number”. If you want to apply for a SIM card within KSA you need this border number to apply for the SIM card. It is not a visa number even though it is on the visa. When the shop was configuring my new sim there was much head scratching involved as they were putting the number into the visa number field and not the border number field. This was on red bull mobile. I presume all operators are the same.

If you have your visa in your passport you need to get back to the booths to do the immigration part. Just push into the line of cars  on foot. GO to the same booth originally used as they have your gate pass. They stamp it with stamps for the number of people in the vehicle. So now that slip of paper has three stamps (in our case)

After you have your visa you carry on to the next hanger and that is where customs is.

At the booth they told us to go inside to see “the manager” this was through a door to the left of the booths.

Once through the door and to the right he had a big desk in the open plan office. We just waited our turn and handed over the car document. In our case this was simply our passport and Botswana car registration document. He messed around on the PC and used Google translate for something. He entered some details but I do not know what happened as we received no papers.

He called somebody over with a tablet computer who took us outside for the vehicle inspection.

In our case the inspection was quick, he asked two questions. One about pork and one about alcohol and that was it. He looked briefly inside the vehicle.

The final part of this journey is you need to buy insurance for your vehicle. This is done at the booths shown in the picture below. The pricing is fixed and displayed in a price table at the booths. 3 months car is 460 SAR.

You also get a final stamp on the gate pass that has been running all the way through this from the insurance company.

Hand over the gate pass with all of the stamps.