As I retrieved my passport from the impeccably professional German immigration officer (isn't it wonderful that, right from these first glimpses of a nation, people do absolutely live up to their bestowed national cliches?) at Tegel airport, though, a thought took hold. It was with a big, pragmatic sigh of relief that I welcomed the day I became a British citizen. Finally, here it was: the end to interminable queueing and waiting at every European airport, to the forced absence of spontaneous trip-making (to those of you who've never had to apply for a Schengen e.g. European visa: the whole process is quite a lot lengthier than you'd imagine), and to whole days wasted at the Mayfair fortress otherwise known as the US Embassy (again, the process of going through a US visa application, even for the briefest visits, is worth a few pages in itself). I would have had every intention to retain my original, honourable nationality had the travel restrictions it carried not created so many practical problems for someone who genuinely needs to travel lot. Pragmatism usually scores high on my list of human virtues, and in this instance it certainly was no exception.
But I guess every 'progress' (for want of a better word to befit the situation) has its pitfall. Just like an online photo album that, for all its convenience, cannot quite replicate the sense of holding a physical album in your hands, or the world's best social portals that would never match the excitement of finding a hand-written letter in the letterbox unexpectedly, the border-friendly UK passport meant that a good part of our stamp collection would henceforth no longer exist.
The collection, of course, consists of visas for countries (which, as a travelling Chinese, we had to apply for in order to get into more or less any country on earth other than China itself), and entry and exit stamps received at each border crossing. The physical space these took on both our passports meant that we always had to have them renewed much sooner than the official expiry date was to be. Over the years, they've piqued the curiosity of more than one Immigration officer, usually at the borders of countries where, presumably, they don't see a lot of Clooney-esque Chinese (his character, not him) passing by that often. Several years ago, at the Finland-Russia border check on our train from Helsinki to St Petersburg, the young pair of guards held on to our passports for abnormally close (read: back to back) scrutiny, for a full ten minutes. It was only on reflection did we realise that they might never have seen such a bountiful collection of visa stamps in any passports before - the Europeans wouldn't need them, and the Chinese that would have popped up in their line of work weren't as travel-mad as we were.
Again in retrospect, I think I did always take pride in presenting my passport at countless immigration booths - not out of nationalism, but out of the universal identity-pride of indefatigable travellers. The physical evidence was there - every flight, every train ride, every transit - and became the perfect reminder that being on the road was not just a state of mind, a kind of nice idealism, but something fully tangible that involved someone validating your movements at each and every border crossing. It involved, unintentionally, building up a stamp collection.
I'm not the type of traveller who meticulously keeps train tickets and boarding pass stubs, and my record of our travels by way of written and photo journals is far from complete. The little pile of stamp-filled Chinese passports between us really was the only perfect, detailed record of our first decade of travelling together. This might no longer exist in the same form, but hopefully our border-friendly British passports will in time be filled with a brand new stamp collection soon enough - after all, there are enough unusual corners of the world where they don't open their doors to Britons that easily. What was it again they said about off the beaten track?
