Remember to check your passport.

I've been silent these past few days. It's been a busy time, with us running around getting ready for our trip to Sepang (which happened last weekend, more later).

So last Friday, over a week before we were to leave, we went to apply for our Malaysian visas. This normally takes 3 days to process, so we were confident that we'd be ready by Wednesday.

On handing over the passports to the travel agent, we realised that Sa's passport had just one empty page left, and that it would not be accepted by the Malaysian authorities (why?). We felt even worse when we flipped thro the passport and found at least 6 pages with just one rubber stamp (entry or exit stamps) on them. If all of these stamps had been made with a little more care, we'd have had 5 pages more. It was worse that all these renegade stamps were made by Indian immigration. I have this theory that they work hand in glove with the Foreign Service to ensure more revenue from NRIs, from adding additional passport booklets.

As they say here, bohpien, so Monday morning, we went to the Indian High Commission, joined a queue of at least 50 others (at 8:30 am), and waited for half an hour. To our dismay we again realised that this additional booklet would take 2 days to process, which then implied we wouldn't have the time to get the Malaysian visa done.

To cut a long story short, we paid a (huge) express service fee, got the passport back immediately, went to the travel agent that evening, submitted it, and picked up the visas on Friday evening, about 12 hours before we were to leave.

And that was just the beginning of our adventure in Sepang.

Moral of the story: Remember to check your passport at least 3 weeks before you leave for anywhere.