HEADING out to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for a hard-earned vacation?
Planning an exhilarating drive on the Autobahn? Don’t forget to take international driving licence.
Hold on. The GDR? Didn’t it cease to exist in the late 1980s with the reunification of Germany?
Depends who you ask. Wikipedia says yes, but the Cyprus Road Transport Department begs to differ.
To say that the licences issued by the department are outdated would be an understatement.
Among others, the obsolete document lists countries such as Southern Rhodesia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, and refers to Hong Kong as a British colony.
Needless to say, Southern Rhodesia is now known as Zimbabwe, the USSR is no more, and Hong Kong has been returned to China.
The problem is that the department is still going with the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic dating back to 1949.
The Vienna convention is an international treaty designed to increase road safety and aid international road traffic by standardising the road signs, traffic lights and road markings in use internationally.
It has since been repeatedly amended to take into account sweeping world events such as the independence of African nations in the 1960s, the collapse of the Eastern bloc in the 1980s and more recently the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
The story was brought to the attention of Politis, after a reader wrote to the paper to complain of this “embarrassing” situation.
The reader’s wife, an American, had been planning a trip back home. Since her US driving licence had expired during her stay in Cyprus, she thought it faster to have an international one issued here.
But when the licence arrived in the post, her husband was stunned to see all the old names of countries, which would make Cypriot authorities a bit of a laughing stock in airports abroad.
The paper then contacted Soteris Kolettas, director of the Road Transport Department, for an explanation.
Kolettas said the department was aware of the discrepancy, and had taken steps to bring their documents up to date.
It seems Road Transport had been waiting to receive the amended Vienna Convention from the relevant UN department.
Kolettas said the new licences were now in the process of being printed, and that they would be available very soon.
There is another question: what happens when you want to travel to the Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia or Croatia? Because, according to Road Transport records, these places do not exist.
Kolettas could not be reached for comment yesterday.
