I must say you guys are extremely daring or is that foolish leaving your passport in your jacket pocket, or the seat pocket or in a daypack in the the overhead locker.
After talking to my sister who was Australian Honorary Consul in Lagos for several years about the number of people who lost or had their passport stolen I would never do any of the above.
While she was in Joburg a few years ago a guy came up beside her and put one arm over her shoulders while holding a knife in his other hand in her armpit. He told her to smile and pretend they were cuddling. She lost all of her documents in her daypack and purse including her passport and her camera but at least she wasn't hurt.
When I travel, usually for 4 months at a time, my passport never leaves my person for the whole time except when showering or sleeping and if I'm sleeping in a campground, not even then.
I bought one of the skin coloured ultra thin passport pouches from a $2 shop. I cut off the straps and sewed 8mm elastic straps to the top and bottom to form a mini backpack. I wear it on my back under my shirt. My daypack hides it if I'm not wearing a jacket. I keep my passport, spare credit card and car lease Green Card in it.
The elastic means that when I have to show the passport I can stretch the elastic to bring the pouch to the front.
I now wrap the passport in plastic because sweat has gotten under the laminate and discoloured the photo. When I got pulled out of line at Melbourne airport 2 years ago the special passport inspector who used a loupe to examine my passport told me that the sweat had caused some of the security features of the passport to become illegible and that I should consider getting a new passport.
Since then I have visited NZ, USA, Malaysia, EU, former Yugoslav republics, Bulgaria, Romania and UK with no problems. I have also been through Oz passport control several times with no further inspections.
My passport has 12 months to go so it only has to last one more trip before I get a new one.
My millionaire brother in law gave me a super duper Smith and Canova English leather passport folder for Christmas. I said thank you. It looks and smells wonderful but I certainly won't be using it - far too bulky and insecure for me.
Funny story about passport control.
When we arrived at the Greece-Turkey border 2 years ago they asked for the Green Card insurance card for our leased Renault. I searched my pouch and the glove box and our luggage but I couldn't find it.
It's quite difficult to get out of no man's land and back into Greece. There's a form that has to be filled in but no-one could/would tell me where to get it or who to see to get it approved. Finally, someone came out of the main office and he sorted things out.
Getting back into Greece was then difficult. "You only just left. Why are you coming back?" At least the guard spoke English so I could explain.
Back in Greece I phoned Renault in Paris and they assured me that they had given me a Green Card. We then looked in my partner's pouch and there it was!
We crossed back into Turkey.
That night the PC died. It runs our satnav system and is used for making bookings, email, banking and so on.
Decision time. Continue to Istanbul without satnav or any way to find and book a hotel or find a PC shop or return to Greece.
I knew that the Turkish keyboard layout was different to the US keyboard and that surprisingly the Greek keyboard uses the US layout with the Greek letters accessed via the ALT GR key (right ALT for those who don't have an international PC).
We decided to return to Greece as it was only 30km back to the border and another 30km to Alexandropolis, the first major town in Greece.
Boy did we get a hard time at the Greek border. "This is the second time you've entered Greece in 12 hours!"
We got to A just before 0900 on a Friday morning expecting the shops to open at 0900. They didn't. It was a public holiday just in A to celebrate their liberation from Turkey in 1918.
Two good things were that we got to watch the parade and we had all day to find all the PC shops in town.
On Saturday morning we visited all the shops and eventually bought a PC. I used the power in the shop to install and setup Windows and all my satnav software - MS AutoRoute and Garmin nRoute.
Then we went and got lunch. After that we set off for Turkey again.
The first PC had been destroyed when the 12V DC to 240 AC inverter blew up and spiked the RAM.
I was running the second PC off my low capacity inverter. After 20km or so it overheated and tripped. After that it would only provide power for a few minutes before it tripped again.
We drove back to A.
All the PC shops closed at 1400 on Saturday.
A is lovely city but we certainly ran out of things to do after spending part of Thu, all day Fri, Sat arvo and all day Sun there.
First thing Mon morning we bought a new inverter and headed back to the Greece-Turkey border.
Fourth time lucky we zoomed through the border and went on to have a fantastic time spending a month driving along the Mediterranean coast to the Syrian border and then up to the Black Sea and back along the coast to Istanbul.
