Super Size Me…Getting A New Passport While Traveling

My passport is full, obese with stamps; it has eaten well over the last 20 months of travel.  And like a chubby person in an airplane seat, there are so many stamps that there are stamps spreading out on top of stamps without an empty page or seat in sight.   Each of the 24 pages of my passport, stuffed with a stained collage of ink marks as juicy looking as cellulite in a mini skirt.

 Therefore, this week I ate enough bureaucracy to leave me with indigestion. The 3 course meal consisted of the Australian Embassy in Laos for an appetizer, their cousins the Canadian Embassy in Thailand for the main course and their friend the Canadian Government in Canada for dessert.  I say thank you to the passport chefs on 2 continents and 3 countries, thank you for super sizing me and cooking me up a 48 page double sized passport.  The Big Mac of passports layered with endless travel ingredients and empty pages. Ironically, my appetite for pedaling through foreign lands is far healthier than anything on the McDonald’s menu.

However, as I pedal through northern Laos and wait on my Big Mac to arrive from Canada, I sing the two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese song and change the words to my 2 all new passports, empty pages, visas, cheese etc. and dream to become fat with travel.  In three weeks time, my Big Mac passport will arrive at the capital of Laos and I will backtrack from the Chinese border to retrieve my hungry travel mate. Pandemic The Magic Bicycle will patiently wait my return at the Chinese border so we can continue north through the Himalaya foothills.  In the meantime, I pedal along through the hilly mountains singing and happy to someday soon be super sized with a double sized passport and grateful that I haven’t seen a real McDonald’s in over 3 months.