I was reading an article about losing passports on a blog called “I Am The Cheese” today and it got me thinking about my relationship with my passports and dealing with immigration in the various countries I have visited.
I was 16 years old when I got my first passport, and I can remember being so thrilled when I received it. I looked at all the blank pages and dreamt of filling them up with stamps from exotic destinations.
I’ve had a total of five passports. I filled up two of them, destroyed one in the wash, had one expire without filling it up, and I’m currently working on filling up a new fairly new one.

The old passports were easy to fill up because back in the early 1970s, when I started travelling, the stamps in passports tended to be big, elaborate and colourful affairs.

I used to love it when I’d get a nice big new visa stamp in my passport. It was as though my passport was a gun and each new visa stamp was like a notch on the barrel, marking off each new kill. This might sound crazy, but I used to love crossing borders and filling out the immigration forms. The more questions on the forms for me to fill out the happier I was.
Although I liked getting the visa stamps in my passport and filling out the all the forms I didn’t have that much respect for the whole concept of authority. I used to bristle at the thought that my stays in various countries would be limited by how much time was allowed by the stamps in my passport.
The first time, this attitude got me into trouble was in the second country that I visited, Indonesia in 1974. Back then, you could only get a one-month visa, and if you wanted to extend it used to cost $25 US for another 30 days. This extra charge struck me as being outrageous, because at that time, I was making about $80 a week, and it seemed like a huge amount of money to pay. Thanks to my bad attitude, I decided that I wasn’t going to pay the $25 extra and that I was going to sneak out of the country on a fishing boat or something when I felt like leaving, instead of getting the proper extension. So I took my time as I dawdled through the Indonesia from West Timor to Bali and then on to Java and Sumatra.
By the time I got to Sumatra I started to realise it wasn’t going to be so easy to leave illegally, and it would probably cost me way more than the $25 extra charge I was trying to save. Plus there was the problem of arriving in another country illegally. I’m not a very good chess player.
Okay, okay, so I’m as a sharp as a bowling ball! I know, I know!
By the time I’d gotten to the small town of Djambi in the southern part of Sumatra I had already overstayed my visa so I went to the local immigration office to sort things out. Rumour had it that all officials in Indonesia were extremely corrupt. So I hit upon a cunning plan.
I got all of my money, with the exception of about $10 worth of local currency and hid it in my shoes, and then I went into the immigration office and ask to speak to the boss. Amazingly, I was taken straight in to see a General of Immigration (there’s a general for everything over there). I walked straight up to him and shook his hand and then explained to him as best I could in broken Indonesian, that not only had I overstayed my visa, but I only had $10 to bribe him with to fix things up.
The general looked incredulous and embarrassed, as I, a long red haired teenage idiot offered him a pittance to compromise himself and break the law. As a condition to entering Indonesia, I had to have an onward ticket out of the country, and the cheapest ticket out of Indonesia that could be bought overseas was a 15 minute air Malaysia flight from Medan, Sumatra to Penang in Malaysia. The general asked to see my onward ticket so I showed it to him and then he asked to see my passport. The general then stamped my passport and wrote in my passport that I had 10 days to get out of the country. He then told me that if I didn’t leave by that time that I would go to jail, and that it was basically a deportation order.

Whoo! Hoo! My first sort of deportation! Awright! I was special, and I had special stuff written in my passport. I couldn’t have been happier. I showed every other traveller I met over the next couple of months.
The next time I got into trouble with immigration was in Cambodia. By the time I had arrived in Cambodia (about six months after I’d left home) I was starting to run out of money so I had to look for some work. One of the beauties of being a native English speaker is that one can always teach English in non English-speaking countries, with dodgy governments. The fact that I wasn’t qualified didn’t even enter my mind and it wasn’t very long before I found a bit of work here and there pretending to teach people how to speak English. The matter that I was on a 30 day tourist visa, and I wasn’t supposed to work didn’t even appear as a blip on tje outer edges of my radar.
Who ever said “ignorance is bliss”, sure knew their stuff, when it came to my attitude towards governments and their rights to control the movement and the employment of foreigners within their borders. I just didn’t give a shit.
Cambodia during my stay was in the midst of a civil war, and as such, the government was a shambolic free for all. It was pretty easy at the time to get extensions to the visas, but it was much more problematic to get permission to work. I had gone into the immigration Department to explain that I wanted to change my tourist visa to a work visa, and I was told that they would think about it. That evening two immigration officers turned up at my place, and just hung around for about an hour or so, making small talk. I was so clueless at the time, I thought they were just being sociable and I didn’t realise that I was supposed to pay them some money to sort my visa status out. When it was obvious that they were wasting their time with me, they left, and my visa wasn’t extended or changed.
To be honest, at the time I didn’t care. That is until I got a letter from the Australian Embassy, telling me to leave because the Khmer Rouge were about to take the city, and I had to leave in a hurry. When I went to buy my air ticket out, I was informed that I had to get permission to leave the country, because my papers were no longer in order.
I went back to the immigration Department to try and set the matter straight. I was kept waiting in a stuffy hot office for about two hours, and during that time a long haired American traveller who was there before me, totally lost his cool and started yelling and screaming at the immigration staff. He had been waiting for so long and it was the second time he had been through the long waiting rigmarole thing. Apoplectic with rage, his face turned a bright red as he spluttered invective at a seemingly imperturbable desk clerk. The American could see he was getting nowhere, and that the immigration staff were beginning to enjoy his little rant so he just “tossed his plaits” and stormed off.
A short while later I was shown in to the office of the man in charge, Su Sonn the Controleur de Police. He was one of those greasy arrogant and horrible people, who made their way in the world by squeezing money out of everybody he came into contact with. I had seen him around town before, riding around on a big Harley Davidson dressed in a khaki safari suit and he used to wear a side arm in a holster around his waist. He parted his hair in the middle and slicked it back with a greasy pomade. To complete the slime-bag image that he was cultivating, he was smoking a cigarette in a tortoise shell cigarette holder and wore aviator Ray Bans.
Su Sonn sat behind his desk, slumped in his chair as he gave my passport a cursory look. With a grunt he flicked it casually back at me, making sure it fell on the floor and said to “me come back tomorrow”.
I was starting to see why the American had lost it. As I picked up the passport off the floor I remembered that the next day was a public holiday so as I stood up, I flicked the passport back across the table towards him, so it landed in his lap and I said to him “tomorrow is a public holiday, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks”.
It’s never a good idea to lose one’s temper in Asia with officials because they see it as a sign of weakness and lack of control. It only causes them to despise you even more. I knew that Su Sonn scumbag was counting on me caring about whether or not I could get my exit permit.
The thing was though, I didn’t care.
I figured that if the guy was going to mess me around and then try and get some kind of huge bribe from me, I might as well, just say that my passport had been stolen and get another one. To hell with him! I was naive, brainless, 10 foot tall and bullet-proof.
I went back several days later and picked up the passport without any problems.

Whoo! Hoo! Awright! I was extra special now, and I had extra special stuff written in my passport. I couldn’t have been happier. It was the first time I ever had to get permission to leave a country!
The next time I got into trouble with immigration was about a year later, in Japan. Again, I had gone into the country on a tourist visa, with the intention of teaching English. The Japanese at the time, where giving visas valid for multiple visits for two months over a six month period, that could be each be extended for another month.

So in practice what one had to do was go to Korea after three months and then come back for another three months and then go out of the country again to get another Visa. Which I did, but the only problem was that when I tied to return to Japan, the Immigration officials at Smimonseki looked at my previous visa, and figured that I’d already stayed six months and that was long enough considering that I didn’t have enough money to support a tourist visit.
They knew I was working, and I got to see side of the Japanese character that most Australians hadn’t seen since the Second World War. All I can say is that it is the Japanese make the best of friends, but the absolute worst of enemies. Thanks to my wilful disrespect of Japanese immigration laws I got to see the nasty side of Japanese culture. They started to threaten me with ” we put you in monkey house”. “You no go home long time”. I could see that they are enjoying watching me to twist in the wind and the belligerent taunting went on for what seemed like hours.
I was getting desperate, and I finally blurted out that I had to get back to Tokyo, because my Japanese fiancé was waiting for me. That threw a real wrench in their works, and they were full of consternation at what to do. After much heated debate in raised voices, they decided to ask me what my fiancé’s phone number was. I gave them my girlfriend’s phone number, and they called her and asked if it was true, I was her fiancé. It was the first time Akemi had heard any such thing but luckily for me, she played along and gave the immigration guys assurances that we were in fact going to be married very soon. Incredibly, I was given a three-month stay and allowed to carry on back to Tokyo. Un-freaking-believable!
So I went back to Tokyo and continued teaching, but the three months went by awfully quickly, so I decided to hell with this, and overstayed my visa again.
In Japan foreigners have to register with the police, and they receive what is known as a gaijin (foreigner) card that they have to carry on their persons at all times. The gaijin card has to be updated by the police every couple of months. Everything was going really well until I went to get my gaijin card updated and an unusually thorough policeman asked to look at my passport to check my details (it was the first time that it happened) and he noticed that I had overstayed my visa. I was told I was in serious trouble and I had to go to the immigration Department immediately.
Strangely enough, the immigration Department wasn’t very happy with me, and after reading me the “riot act”, they made me write out a personal apology to the emperor of Japan for breaking his laws (I’m not kidding) and then they told me I had a week to get my affairs in order and get out of the country or as I going to jail for three years.
Bummer!
When it came time for me to check in at the airport, the counter staff waved over two the huge beefy Japanese plainclothes policeman, who came over to me and without a word, each held me underneath an arm and kept a hold of me until the plane came. When it came time to board, with hundreds of other passengers watching, the plainclothes policeman frog-marched me onto the aeroplane. I didn’t feel so it elated about having a real deportation happen. It was shameful and embarrassing, plus I was not allowed back into Japan for at least another five years. I loved Japan and the Japanese.
Double bummer!
As it turned out, I didn’t return to Japan for another 29 years.
My how things have changed, or should I say how I’ve changed. I wouldn’t dream of trying any of that nonsense on nowadays. I like my border crossings to be trouble-free, and I go out of my way to keep my nose clean when I travel. These days I have, itineraries, rental cars, travel insurance and obey the laws of the countries that I go into without giving it a second thought.
The trouble is, when one does the right thing, it doesn’t lead to any experiences that are worth the telling. Now when I come back from overseas trips, and anybody asks me about my trip, I can sum it all up with the following statement, ” I had a really great time, and everything went well”.
Nowadays it’s much harder to fill up a passport with stamps as they’re now these dinky little anticlimactic things.

One can assume, the more sophisticated the country, the smaller and more insignificant their entry and exit stamps are. It would seem that it’s only Third World countries with Byzantine bureaucracies have nice big colourful stamps (more like bank notes really) any more.
