Through Bajan Eyes

Travelling around the world on a Barbadian passport can be quite an interesting experience in itself. What will happen at that first point of contact . . . where you hear those magic words “Passport, please!”

Visas!

First things first, you’ll need a visa to go quite a few places. The procedures for obtaining visas can vary from consulate to consulate. Some are dead easy – fill in a form, send off your passport and they’ll stamp a visa and send it back within 2-3 days. Others require you to book your whole holiday (flights and accommodation) first before they will grant a visa. This can prove to be painful if they then decline your application, as you’ll probably lose some money in the process.

Flights and visa fees aren’t usually refundable. Some consulates allow you to apply by post, others let you use an agency, and some insist that you have to be interviewed in person. Even the validation period of the visa can vary a lot. Some visas last only as long as your holiday. Some visas can last up to 10 years and allow multiple entries into that country. In the UK, nearly all of them will involve calling a premium-rate number and you paying £1.50 a minute to make an appointment.

So you’ve got your visa and everything is in order and so you hop on that plane excited to be visiting a new destination. The fun is about to begin. For me it begins at the immigration/passport control desk. It will usually take me much longer than anyone else on the aeroplane to get past this point. I’m considering getting a t-shirt printed which says, at the back “Choose another queue. This queue may seem short now, but I’ll be at that desk for a while”. Despite my many experiences though, none of them have ever been particularly negative – just a bit slow and I do get restless sometimes.

The Airport

I usually try to learn the basic greeting in the native language of the country. I step forward, with my fingers marking two pages in the passport – the one with the visa and the one with the photo and information. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible. I say “Good day” in a cheery voice and I smile. I try to keep this smile on my face as long as possible. It usually starts to hurt after about five minutes, but I keep it there. Actually, I practice this beforehand as part of my holiday preparation. Smile in the mirror for up to half an hour at a time – start off with five minutes and gradually increase it. Make sure it’s a genuine-looking smile. The beaming ones hurt more and are harder to keep anyway. Immigration people are trained not to show emotion so this is always an unreturned smile.

Now in most of Western Europe and the Americas this is pretty straightforward. They’ll take the passport; look at the country on the front; look at the information; look at the visa; ask a few questions; apply a few stamps; and you’re in.

But in other places, the Barbadian traffic is a little less frequent, so the procedure is a bit different. I’ll hand over the passport and a couple of things will cross my mind at this point. Have they heard of Barbados? I’m aware that Barbados is a very small country and doesn’t always feature on standard-scale world maps. So it wouldn’t surprise me if half the world hasn’t heard of the place. So it has crossed my mind to perhaps travel with an atlas.

No matter how long I’ve stood there, I try not to ever let my eye roll up to the top of my head (it’s a struggle). I never sigh. I never look pissed off. And most importantly, I never let my smile drop for more than a nano-second. Always make eye-contact as much as possible.

You see, this is the most vulnerable part of any journey. One false move, the officer might be having a bad day, the slightest thing and, visa or no visa, they can refuse you entry. This has never happened to me but I imagine it would be very heartbreaking indeed.

My Experiences

Let me tell you about some of my experiences:

On the border from China (read more about my chinese experience) into Mongolia, I was keen to be on the train when they changed the bogeys. The passports were collected from the passengers and processed en masse, so when they'd returned my travel companion and I took the opportunity to go to the shop in the terminal, knowing that we had a few minutes before the train went to the workshop.

So having been in the shop, we were headed back to the train when one of the passport control officers stopped us. She asked to see my passport (not my friend's); she looked at it, then called her colleague over to see. After a minute or two scrutinising it, she handed it back to me and the two of them went off. No big deal . . . except the train drove off and we didn't get to see the bogey training.

Only two things could've made her detain me (for no reason): 1. My 'unusual appearance' - they don't get too many black (with dreadlocks) people at that border; and 2. my unusual passport!!!

Another experience which happened only a week or so after the chinese one, was when I was trying to leave Russia to go back to the UK. Pass the airline check-in, pass the security checks and we've reached passport control. I walked up to the desk and handed the lady my passport. She looked at it. 5 minutes later, she was still looking at it. Then she called her colleague - they looked at it. Then she told me wait to one side while she checked everyone else in the queue. Then she left her booth and went somewhere with my passport. 5 minutes later she came back, stamped the passport, gave it back to me and I had to run to catch my plane.

I can only conclude that it was the passport. She'd never seen one before. So she just had to be certain it was all above board, right?

Well in my mind, passport control officers play a game. You score points according to how unusual a passport is. For example an Uzbekistani passpot might be common in Moscow (and score onlny 1 point), whereas it would be rare in Port of Spain (and score many more points).

I can only conclude that my Russian agent hit the 'jackpot' on the day that I walked up and she had to make sure she had enough witnesses to verify her claim!!