It's often frustrating when you read official regulations regarding crossing a particular border, because they change all the time and sometimes simply get tossed aside at the border.

For instance, officially, the Canadian embassy must provide the stamp in my passport for translation (I'm Canadian, duh) and then I must find a translator approved by the Libyan embassy to fill in the details and stamp their approval to the text. Well, the Libyan embassy in Cairo insisted that the Canadian embassy do the entire translation, and the Canadians insisted that they wouldn't. In the end, I got the stamp from Canada with the Arabic fields left blank, then I had a guy at my hostel do the translation (without benefit of an official stamp) and it worked.

Others in my party (that recently crossed from Egypt to Tunisia through Libya) downloaded a translation from the internet, put the sticker in the passport themselves, then found an "official looking" rubber stamp, and that worked too... a complete forgery!

In fact, out of the six of us that crossed the border into Libya, three of us had a least one piece of official documentation that was fake. Dicey! But we were desperate.

And, no, we were never asked about $1,000 in currency.

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Jeremy Kroeker
www.MotorcycleTherapy.com