I haven’t had many relationships that have lasted 10 years. A few cherished friendships stretch back much further than that. I have the relationship with my partner, the mother of our children, a union that is still going strong.
Most, however, have petered out well before we’ve reached the decade mark. That’s a major milestone, a serious long-term relationship.
So you can understand the tinge of sadness when I rolled up to the post office a few weeks ago to have my photo taken and fill out a form.
I’m breaking up with my old passport. It hasn’t quite been the full 10 years – unfortunately, our relationship has run its course within nine. There’s no room left for us to grow together. I have to let go.
Ten years – or rather, nine years in this case – is a long time. You get used to the look and feel of your passport. You associate its increasingly battered cover with all your adventures, every exciting journey, every overseas jaunt that would begin with the search for that passport and its scanning at passport control.
We’re going somewhere amazing, that passport says. We’re doing something cool.
Your passport is a permanent record, too, of those places you’ve been, the things you’ve done over almost a decade. Passport stamps might be increasingly phased out around the world, but they do still exist, and they still sit there in that little book for years and years.
I’m a massive nerd, it’s true, but I’ll flip through the pages of my passport when I’m hanging around in a security queue or waiting to board a flight. In my old passport I have favourite pages, where the stamps look particularly cool, where I have a mix of Arabic script, Chinese, Cyrillic and Roman slapped in bold across worn paper.
I can look back over the visas too, the big one-pagers for China, for Uzbekistan, for Kenya and the US.
This thing is a historical document, it’s a record of who I am. Some people collect boarding passes, some scrapbook their ticket stubs and old itineraries, some obsessively print and categorise travel photos. I don’t really do any of that.
What I have is my passport, with its exotic blend of languages, its haphazard stamping styles (UAE all over the shop, the US upside down, France upside down and slapped across the middle of a page; Japan and most of the EU perfectly regimented), its varyingly awful headshots of me in visa stickers.
Sigh. Of course my old passport also has a few more concrete essentials. I know its details off by heart. Any time I have to fill in my passport number, the expiration date, the date of issue, anything else really, I know it off the top of my head. Not anymore.
I also have not one but two US visas in there, the B1/B2 business visas I have had to apply for because I don’t qualify for the US’s visa-waiver program (I’ve visited Iran, one of the “bad” countries). I’ll have to go visit a consulate to have another one placed in my new passport, if I ever decide to visit the US again.
There’s another issue, too, with bidding farewell to an old passport, and that’s the cost of attaining a new one. Australian passports are incredibly expensive when compared to the rest of the world – in fact it’s only Turkey that charges its citizens more to produce this vital document.
My new passport set me back $412. That’s an expensive break-up. If I was German that same document would cost me about $180. If I was American it would be about $200. If I was British, about the same (and I would have been able to do the entire application process online, rather than roll up to a post office).
What does Australia do with its passports that makes them more than twice as expensive to produce than other countries similar to ours? Mostly, the government just doesn’t subsidise the cost, and indeed it may earn revenue from them – a passport is a luxury, it reasons, not a necessity. And the cost will continue going up with CPI.
Yes, we Australians are extremely fortunate to qualify for a passport currently ranked the 8th most powerful in the world (which would be nicer if we weren’t two places behind New Zealand). But it still hurts having to pay so much money to replace a document that I would really love to keep forever.
Instead, you walk into a post office, the guy working there snaps off a photo at lightning speed, and before you know it you’re standing outside the shop, realising you barely even looked at those photos before you committed to one for the next 10 or so years, to another document that will become your long-term travel partner.
And I only have to wait up to five weeks for it to appear.
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Ben Groundwater is a Sydney-based travel writer, columnist, broadcaster, author and occasional tour guide with more than 25 years’ experience in media, and a lifetime of experience traversing the globe. He specialises in food and wine – writing about it, as well as consuming it – and at any given moment in time Ben is probably thinking about either ramen in Tokyo, pintxos in San Sebastian, or carbonara in Rome. Follow him on Instagram @bengroundwaterConnect via email.
