Future transport of delights

Last night I booked flights for Seoul, the most expensive ones I've purchased to fly within Asia.  I found that a little bit of a daunting prospect, but then it will be only the second time I've left Hong Kong this year - after my triumphant return to Britain in February.  Or unless I scamper over to Macau in the meantime.  So perhaps I have the right to treat myself to the joy of sitting in a metal cylinder thousands of feet above the ground for a few hours.

Today I got an invitation to visit the company office in Beijing.  I've been there once before, back in November of 2008, and I have mixed feelings about Beijing.  It's the opposite of Hong Kong in a lot of ways: Hong Kong is terribly hot outside and glacial inside, whereas Beijing is chilly until you go inside and almost faint from the stuffy heat being pumped into every building.  Beijing is a succession of enormous buildings and wide open spaces; Hong Kong is what happens when you tax people by how much area their buildings occupy, and they avoid unnecessary expense by building upwards and close together.  And Hong Kong has lots of tiny alleyways and little old businesses, whilst Beijing had been busy demolishing the old hutongs ... oh.  Maybe they're not so different after all.

The other reason I'm not completely overjoyed about travelling there is the worry of my passport; space in it is shrinking fast, and since my last visa to China expired in October last year, I will need to surrender another page in the thing for a new visa.  I have two fresh pages left, and then it's going to be a matter of a grumpy immigration official in whatever country I visit next having to hunt through the passport for a space to thwack his stamp.  I'm not entirely sure what will happen if he can't find the space.  Well, I am: I'm going to have to leave whatever country I arrive in, before I even get there.  And I like travelling much more than I enjoy being denied admittance to a country.

But for now, I should have the space to get into China.  They're one of the few countries (the other one is the United Kingdom - figure that out if you will) where the customs always scrutinise my passport and ask searching questions when I'm trying to get in.  (Australia, Taiwan and Singapore have all looked on me with suspicion when I left, but were happy to let me enter - fit that into a model of security if you can, after you've decided why the UK doesn't want to welcome me back with open arms and a cheery smile.)

I guess it could be to do with me not resembling my passport photo whatsoever.

But given the cost of replacing my passport (well over a thousand Hong Kong dollars, and while that's not so much in UK pounds, anything that costs more than a thousand of anything feels expensive) I've been holding off on a replacement until I can get as much mileage out of this one as possible.  Knowing my luck I'll pay for a 48 pager and then find I travel exactly nowhere for the next ten years.

So going into China is a bit of a hassle, and getting my visa application in time is also going to be a bit of a pain (need the passport back before I flee for the UK, after all, in less than two weeks), but all the same, it's a step closer to replacing it, which is (possibly) good, as it may mean that the Chinese officials will refrain from asking difficult, apparently tricky questions to me like

What is ... ... ... your name?

I'm probably dreaming.  Dollars to doughnuts, pounds to pork pies or negotiable bearer bonds to nougat, I'll get a passport with my big beardy hairy visage glowering out, then the next day I'll fall out of a tree and all my hair will drop out.

And since I can't swim to save my life, emulating Duncan Goodhew isn't going to be much of an option.