Border Cameroon-Gabon (Kye Ossi) | Customs and Immigration

Two South African passports, super easy entering Gabon, no visa required. Did not ask for copy of passport, itinerary nor hotel reservation. Not sure if because of ZA passports or a lucky passage. Very quick. Even CPD stamp was a breeze. Only asked for countries visited and took photos of passports to send to Bitam. Still need to get passports stamped in Bitam. Road to Bitam is good tar albeit narrowed due to usual growth on sides.

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You will not necessarily avoid Mr. Glasses by coming to this border. We are pretty sure we had him on the second attempt to cross after we were refused entry due to one of our visas only commencing 3 days later. Embassy indicated it would be fine but not so.

Take note: have your paperwork 100% in order. They will check every detail. Your hotel booking needs to be for the exact day you enter and the hotel will be contacted to confirm. I even had to use my own phone.

You will be expected to provide a full itinerary for your time in Gabon, and a list of countries prior and after, including showing visas for all countries visited. No joke.

They will want a lot of details so allow time to go through it all, at least 1 hour if not more.

If you return to Cameroon because of being denied entry you will find this easy so don’t freak out and camp at the border, just go back. But make sure you get a fresh exit stamp on the way out! We had to go back again and update the stamp. Checkpoints found it hilarious.

Don’t leave anything to chance as cell reception is not good here and I was lucky enough to get one call for the hotel. You won’t be able to make or change bookings here on the spot, or print anything. Print out your e-Visas too.

It seems the strictness comes from the boss in Bitam so arguing here achieves nothing. They have no power and seem very afraid of their boss. There is no corruption here for Westeners at least, it’s just a crazy level of diligence.

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As others said, it’s a quiet and fairly easy border but they were strict about having a hotel reservation including phoning the hotel. We had to make a new one on booking.com which we later cancelled. The man here was ok with it being shown on a phone but the later immigration check required it to be printed at a nearby shop

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Horrible experience. A guy at the border made us wait 5 hours for approval from his boss for us to proceed to Bitam. Need hotel booking, a lot of questions, took photos of inside of out car for his boss, etc.

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They asked me for a hotel reservation (which i had) and even called the hotel to confirm. Make you life easy and just get a Booking.com hotel which you cancel as soon you passed Immigration in bitam

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Also here they can ask you the booking paper hotel, in my case they even call to my fake hotel... better to have a hotel and cancel it latter, I think that depens on the day... quiet border anyway

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We used this border in order to skip the 'famous' guy with glasses from the police checkpoint at the other, more northern border. It went all pretty smoothly, but took some time anyway, because all in all our details were written down 6 times. First 3 times in Cameroon before they opened the barrier, but all people are friendly and no one asked for money.
In Gabon we had to go to the police first, where we had to fill out one immigration form each. There was an official with glasses, but he didn't made any problems. When he asked for our hotel reservation we just said that we are camping and therefore go to a campground in Libreville that we couldn't book upfront. He was ok with that, took down our details and let us go.
A few meters further on the right is customs, where we got our carnet stamped without problems. After that our details were written down 2 more times from police, but eventually all was fine and we could continue. Passports gotten stamped in Bitam.
So if you don't have a valid hotel booking and want to skip the police check at the other border we highly recommend to use this border. It also takes some time, but in the end we didn't had a y problems here.

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