Ode to a Passport
This week I will say farewell and thanks to a trusted companion of the past five years, my old passport. With its expiration date approaching in six months, I applied for a new passport over the holidays and picked it up at the Canadian Embassy this morning. I am very jazzed to finally have a machine readable passport. I can't tell you the number of times I have gotten exasperated looks from airline check-in personnel and immigration officials when they couldn't swipe my passport.
But why the sad good-bye to the old passport? It's only a document, after all. Well maybe but it is also a record of my travels since 2004. Crammed into every available space in the forty-eight pages are visas and arrival and departure stamps from all over the world. There are stamps from the US, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Vietnam, China, Korea, Tahiti, and Thailand to name a few. Large entry visas for China,Vietnam and Indonesia. And of course, all of the arrival and departure stamps for Japan as well as my visas and reentry permits.
However, the one destination that was undocumented in the passport is the DPKR (North Korea) during my March 2008 visit. The visa I received in Beijing was on a piece of paper and inserted into my passport. Upon arrival into the DPRK, my passport was kept by the tour company and returned upon crossing the border back into China. Alas, no trace of that visa remained. That, however, is not a bad thing. Such a thing could have caused numerous problems entering other countries such as the US. While there may be no trace of the trip in my passport, the memories of that trip remain very vivid in my mind.
Thanks my good friend for being a great travel companion and allowing me access into many fascinating places.
