Visas and Passports

If you have at least five hours of transit time at Hamad International Airport (DOH) in Doha, Qatar, you may be able to join any of six Doha city tours scheduled each day. Example — the 2-hour, 45-minute “Doha City Tour,” at QAR40 (near $11) per person, includes the Katara cultural village, the Museum of Islamic Art and Souq Waqif market. 

Dear Globetrotter:

Welcome to the 504th issue of your monthly foreign-travel magazine, yours because you and your fellow readers keep it going by being subscribers and providing the bulk of the material for each issue. Your participation is the key.

After taking a Holland America Line cruise, my wife, Bonnie, and I toured the Baltic states in June 2017 with ElderTreks (Toronto, Canada; 800/741-7956, www.eldertreks.com).

In Latvia, our group traveled north on Route E67, along the Riga Gulf, toward Ainaži and the border with Estonia. Just before crossing the border, on June 19, our bus was pulled over at a police checkpoint and a police officer came aboard asking to see everyone’s travel documents (passports). 

US and Canadian citizens can apply for a tourist visa to Brazil online starting Jan. 15, 2018. The processing time is anticipated to be no more than 72 hours. (The process of applying for a tourist visa at a Brazilian consulate can take more than six weeks.) The Web address for the application and the cost had not been announced as of press time, but it was believed the visa cost of $160 per US citizen would remain the same. 

For more information, contact the Consulate General of Brazil in Washington, DC (202/461-3000, cgwashington.itamaraty.gov.br/en-us).

Visa-free transit stays in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Tianjin have been extended from 72 hours to 144 hours. To qualify for the visa-free visit, a traveler must show that he has an ongoing plane ticket to another country, other than the one he arrived from, and that his flight out of China will be departing before the end of the visa-free period. 

The European Commission, which governs the European Union (EU), announced on Sept. 27 that it now will allow member states to temporarily reinstitute border controls, suspending free movement across borders, because of security concerns due to terrorism. 

The measure will allow member states to enact border controls for six months to two years, depending on the nature of the security threat. Any country wishing to reinstate border controls will need to prove that it faces a serious threat.