The Belgian Passport Breakdown

It is not only Kyrgyz trucks and cars that keep falling apart: it also happens to the newly designed Belgian passports...

In the latest design of the passport, there is a plastic security sheet in front of the name page. This plastic page of Floris's passport (issued only in may this year) started to crack at the edge when we were in Kashgar, but we managed to cross the Chinese-Kyrgyz border without any difficulties.
Meanwhile, of course, with every passport check that page is breaking up more and more, and now it is nearly completely ripped off. As we imagine that travelling overland in this part of the world, which is still troubled by "overzealous officials", with a broken passport could get us into some trouble. Trouble, such as: being refused to cross international land borders, being halted and harassed by local police, being accused of staying illegally in the country,... So we contacted the Belgian authorities in the region about this problem.

We were advised by the issuing consulate in Shanghai to get a letter from a Belgian consulate, stating that the passport is still valid as it is, which should steer us clear from any problems.

But that things are easier said than done is once again proven by the following sequence of events:

• From information obtained on official Belgian websites, there didn't seem to be a Belgian consulate in Kyrgyzstan.
• We went to the German embassy in Bishkek, which handles some matters for EU citizens, but they couldn't help us, as they have no authority to fix non-German passports.
• Later, when we were in Kochkor, we received the contact details from the newly opened Belgian honorary consulate in Bishkek. The consul was very friendly and helpful, receiving us even on Sunday.
• The consul would write us a letter confirming the validity of the passport, but he couldn't validate it with an official stamp... as he hadn't received the consular stamps from Brussels yet! He had been waiting for it for a couple of months, but "it would be arriving soon".
  
• He couldn't type such a letter, as at the moment we were there, there was the usual power cut in this residential block, so he had to hand-write it.
• He wanted to copy his authentication as a consul and attach this to the letter, but as there was no power in his office, we followed him around to a still-powered copy shop around the corner.
  Armed with this letter and his credentials, which he advised us not to try to cross international borders with (as there was no official stamp on it), we parted with the consul. He advised us to wait in Bishkek until the stamp arrived from Brussels.
  
• The next day, we called the embassy in Astana (Kazachstan), asking if they could maybe compose such a letter (with a stamp) and fax that to the consul in Bishkek. The embassy in Astana was very helpful and happy to do that.
  Just as we sent out an email to Astana with a copy of Floris's passport, we received an email from the consul in Bishkek that the stamp had arrived...

So we only had to wait a couple of days longer than we anticipated, and with this letter (which we will collect this afternoon), we shouldn't have any passport-related problems further on our itinerary. We're in the Happy Zone!

It is also interesting to note that the consul gave us some "unofficial advice", including pointing us to a shop in an underground passageway where we could buy a completely new passport, offering to laminate that page of the passport and giving tips on how to fix it with a bit of scotch-tape. To put it in his words: "This is a crazy part of the world, so you have to do a few crazy things here". Comment duly noted...

For other travellers: the contact details for the Belgian Honorary Consulate in Bishkek (for some reason not stated on the diplobel-website) are:

209-A Tynystanov Street
720040 Bishkek
tel. +996 312 900 100
mobile: +996 (0) 775 58 18 18
e-mail: n.aldashev@lorenz-law.com
web: www.lorenz-law.com