I recently paid a small fortune to get a new passport. (I’d run out of pages-bragging) Plus the additional fees for extra pages, faster processing, and desire not to be yelling into the phone “Doesn’t postal service mean you actually deliver something occasionally?”
Of course, I wouldn’t have been half as annoyed about the decline of my saving account if I had known that my new passport came with a cool computer chip in the middle. Upon discovery of a toy that would catalog my travel history for all the world to envy, I did a little dance and even felt the need to wave it under my brother’s nose, and that of his room mate, his girlfriend and just about anyone else that would give me attention, including my cab driver.
I was still waving it around when I got to the outgoing immigration counter at Melbourne Airport. For me there is nothing sweeter than the thud of an immigration stamp marking the beginning or end of an adventure. My old passport photo made me look like a meth-head. The new one at least had upgraded me to gothic transvestite. Life was changing. Imagine how deflated I felt when my ultra cool, computer chip meant that I no longer needed a stamp.
I tried to appeal to She-Who-Wields-The-Stamp logically; “I travel a lot to places that one might call… third world…they’re not exactly up there with the computer chip techno thingies readers (technical term) on account of trying to feed the masses and evade civil war and all that, think I could maybe get a stamp just so everyone feels comfortable?” Crickets. A slight tactical shift, I pouted my lower lip until it hit the floor and asked, “Can’t you just give me one for old time sake?” Evidently stamps, and senses of humour, are out of date.
There was a time, not so long ago, that foreigners coming into Indonesia would more likely than not find themselves locked in a hot immigration office with a rickety fan and fat man-for a long time. Said fat man would smile at them with bad teeth while they searched their wallets for the appropriate ‘tax’ to be allowed into the country. Times have changed, but major companies still tend to supply little men, sorry ‘escorts’ and ‘translators’ for their employees, just to avoid any drama. As a resident of the forty-fifth floor I too get said perk. I feel very elitist when I get off the plane and there’s a little man holding a sign with poor spelling of my name. He stands with me while I get a visa stuck in my passport, and my ego takes a big deep breathe when I get to use the diplomatic persons line, while everyone else on my flight lines up behind the two planes from China and one from Saudi Arabia. Ten years of coming to Indonesia and I haven’t had a problem, until now.
I knew something was wrong when the little man escorting me called me back because the head immigration official “wanted to look at me”. My ‘Freak on Side Show Alley’ hackles were raised, but I headed to the indicated area (ignored the blaring question of ‘Why?’) and put on the best smile I could with little sleep and bad airline coffee. I thought, ‘Okay, we’ll all get a good look at the seriously pale white girl and then I can go home’. When I was met by the biggest Indonesian in history and lead into an office with no air-conditioning I was not a happy camper to say the least; even less so when asked to take a seat near the rickety fan. I got the feeling Mr Immigration didn’t think my new passport chip thingy (technical term) was as cool as the kids in Oz thought it was.
“Where you from?”, “What job you do?”, “Where you live?”, “Why are you here?”, “When you leave Australia?” and six versions of the same questions over and over in bad English took up the first fifteen minutes that I sat sweating in my chair. My little man had long ago proved useless, and slightly cowardly. If this had happened in Oz I would have bitterly asked the official if he could read an immigration form or if I got to fill those out for fun?
Eventually, I rode the merry-go-round long enough to come to the point. “Australia doesn’t stamp passport now?” Apparently they didn’t get the memo either.
Mr Immigration needed me to prove that I was a good traveler, and not someone that had been kicked out of the country and was coming back on different papers. Easier said than done. I’d made sure I’d taken my old passport back with me, just in case I needed it. Now if only I could find it.
I was too busy ripping apart my laptop case, gripped by fear of becoming the next Shappel Corby, to notice the distinct vocal shift in Mr Immigration, from official, to officially flirting. He scanned my e-ticket print out and asked if I was married. I gave him old boarding passes to prove it wasn’t my first trip to Indonesia, and he asked if I had a boyfriend. I knew I’d packed my old passport (aka ticket to freedom), I just didn’t know where. According to Mr Immigration I “should get a husband to take care of me, to make sure I have all my documents in order when I travel”. [HA! He’d be the one man in the world that didn’t need step by step instructions on how to wash his own socks. And those documents would be the invalid ones that I’m not required to carry because they’re CANCELLED.] I wanted to go home, I knew what I needed to do and that I wasn’t above it. I sat up straight, smiled coyly (yes, I can do that, when I try really hard) and flirted my voluptuous arse off.
“Perhaps you will find Indonesian boyfriend while you’re here?”
I giggled. “You never know.”
“You have visa for one month? Thirty days?”
I nodded and giggled.
I found myself doing a lot of nodding and giggling.
Five minutes later I was escorted to the door and issued Mr Immigration’s final words of ‘wisdom’, though it sounded more like a command than something more subtle. (Though that could have been the influence of the shot gun in the corner)
“Thirty days, Miss Katrina, thirty days to find love in Indonesia.” I nodded and giggled.
I wasn’t waving my passport around anymore.
