Sorry for not posting sooner but we have been processing passport issues that the boat brought to our attention on the evening of April 10th prior to arriving in Bali. Those of you following the blog know that we are experienced travelers but we made a big mistake and we are now trying to deal with it. We have been doing a lot of traveling and while we were keeping up with our passport expiration dates and making sure that we were more than 6 months from the expiration date we had not been keeping up with how many blank pages were in our passports. Blank pages are becoming a bigger and bigger issue when cruising specifically because immigration officials don;t want to spend hours and hours going through passports trying to find a spot to put a stamp and the countries who have’t implemented e visas need a whole page for entry exit permits. If you consider that some of these cruise ships are carrying 6,000 passengers and 4,000 crew it is a big job processing the passports. So now they are “demanding” that you have a certain amount of blank pages prior to embarking. We had a few blank pages but 1 of the blank pages we have is really an endorsement page (whatever that is) and does not count as a blank page.

So we got a call in our stateroom on Thursday April 10th in the evening asking if we could both come down to the reception desk to talk about our passports. Kathy and I had just finished showering after a hot day in port and asked if it had to be right now and they said yes. When we got down to reception they had someone from the back come out and she showed us both our passports and explained that India had recently changed their blank pages request from 2 to 3 and South Africa wanted 2 and we did not have enough. At first we thought that they were just telling us that we would not be able to get off the boat in any of the 3 Indian ports but then they explained that the boat would not be allowed to dock, without a huge fine (undisclosed amount). We asked what our options were and basically she had none. She explained that she had been communicating with corporate and we could try to get help from an American embassy. When we asked if she was telling us that we had to get off she emphatically said “yes, you need to get off”.

We went back to our room, obviously very distressed, and started discussing our options. We looked up American embassies in our next few ports and discovered that there was no embassy in Bali just a Consulate which does not have the same capabilities as an embassy. We did discover there was an embassy in both Jakarta and Singapore, both on our itinerary. We then wondered why no one from the ship was helping us. There is both a general manager and executive concierge on board and we checked the hours for the executive concierge and went down to talk with Fabio. We explained what we had just been told and he seemed surprised to hear of the issue. We mentioned the embassy idea and he helped us to get an appointment in Jakarta for 7:45am on April 14th. We were docking at 7am so a 7:45 appointment was cutting it close but he recommended we give it a try. He also recommended that we get a back-up appointment in Singapore since we would be there over night. Other than that he had no other recommendations but wanted us to touch base with him about our progress. We went back to our room and both of us researched options on line. What we found out was that they have not added pages to passports since 2016 so that was not an option. We also found out that all passports are printed in the US so the soonest we could get one sent overseas was 2 to 3 weeks. The best we could do was be issued an emergency passport which has 12 pages in it. We would have to surrender our passports so they would be inactivated and we would be issued a new passport number so any visas we had under the old number would no longer be valid and we would need to apply for new visas. The emergency passport has no chip in it so cannot be used in automatic passport readers. Also an emergency passport is good for a year but usually only obtained so the person can get back to the US and replace their passport not to continue to travel around the world for another 6 weeks. After getting all this info we were not sure what to do but we did go ahead and get appointments for the Singapore embassy. We also called our friends and travel agents Kris & James to let them know what was going on and to see what they could find out from their end.

Before we got off for our 2 days in Bali we stopped by Fabio’s desk (executive concierge) and told him we had back-up appointments in Singapore but would go to the embassy in Jakarta first. Fabio explained to us that several e-mails had gone back and forth from corporate and while they had no ideas of how to help us they did say NOT to get an emergency passport. Apparently several countries do not accept them including South Africa. We then asked what the possibility was of us getting off the boat before India and then getting back on in the Maldives. The boat said they would check on that option and needed to count up how many stamps we would need in all the remaining ports leaving 2 blank pages for South Africa.

Needless to say we have continued the trip and tried to enjoy the ports but we have had this hanging over our heads. We did have a good time in Bali and the errand that we ran on the second day was based on a recommendation from Kris & James suggesting we try to get passport photos prior to our visit to the embassy in Jakarta. Bali was where we had the driver and car so instead of going to the Temple we had picked out we had our driver, Kadek, call a photo shop we found on line that said they did passport photos. We thought there is no way they would be open at 8am on a Saturday but they were so we headed there first thing. Kadek helped explain what we needed and it took about 30 minutes to get the photos and then have them printed and sent to us electronically. While we were waiting for the photos Kadek called his cousin who used to work for Viking to see if he knew anyone in Jakarta that could help us. He put us on the phone with his cousin who we had spoken to before and his cousin was amazed and upset that no one from Oceania was helping us or had taken so long to catch error.He also said that while this was our fault, the cruise line never should have let us board in Tahiti. He felt some of the responsibility was on them.

The cost for the passport photos both printed and electronic was 63,000 Indonesian rupiah and since we had no local money I brought out my credit card and at that point Kadek stepped in and paid the bill for us knowing we would pay him back. When you do the exchange 63,000 rupiah is equivalent to 3.89 cents US.

We already blogged about the rest of our trip in Bali. We had a sea day prior to our arrival in Jakarta and we spent most it trying to come up with options. We knew that there was not much that the embassy could do in Jakarta but since we had the appointment we decided to keep it and see if they had any other ideas.

We will now try to get the blog up to date and let you know what is happening with our situation as the saga continues.