Please, try and keep hold of your passport…

My heart is racing. I have just done a 90 second pre-dawn dash around Chiang Mai is search of my passport. The one thing I never let out of my sight. Usually it’s snuggled into the pouch of my leather utility belt, which not only stops my fisherman pants from falling down but looks good too, all tightly wrapped in a neat little functional package.

I have just completed a 15 hour bus journey from Vietiane and I think my absent mindedness was down to my excitement for being back in Thailand, my relief to be off a bus full of 19 year old Gap year students who would not stop talking for the entire journey, that is until the knocked themselves out with Valium, and general lack of sleep.

By the time I got to ‘my’ house, I leapt off the bus grabbed my backpack and waved off the Gap years. I was just falling asleep again when something triggered somewhere deep in my sleep deprived brain and I realized that I had I had been separated from my passport, complete with its shiney new 60 day Thai Visa. At that point I think I vomited a little in my own mouth and legged it down the road in search of a tuk tuk. My only thought was that I knew the bus was taking the giggling, sedated Gapper’s to a hostel and that my only hope was to catch it up. My phone was out of battery, but it didn’t matter because I had no way of getting in touch with the bus company anyway. The place where I booked the ticket didn’t have a name, the bus company was inevitably printed on my ticket but I had given that to the driver, obviously, so playing a game of cat and mouse with that bus was my only hope.

Naturally, at 5am in the morning there are very few tuk tuks about. Plenty of drunks, but no actual useful means of transport unless you count the Thai guy on a motorbike who offered to (and I quote) ‘rescue’ me.

I start running down the street, but don’t actually know where the hostel is. I flag down a Sangthaw, when one finally passes, but the driver doesn’t know where the hostel is either. My mind is racing. I am wondering what the process is for a lost passport and can’t help questioning if this is the universes way of trying to tell me that I need to stay in Thailand or indeed that I shouldn’t be embarking on a 21 day meditation retreat from Friday.

Eventually a tuk tuk shows up, charges me an extortionate amount to drive 5 minutes into town and I find the hostel. The Gap year kids are sprawled out across the floor, laying on each other and their packs, because the place isn’t open yet. No one has seen my belt or my passport. Gah. This is quite a wake up call. I would have settled for a nice coffee to bring me round slowly.

I mooch back towards home, half of me resigning to the fact the passport is long gone together with my camera and iPod and the other half tries to somehow manifest the bus driver seeing my forgotten belongings, realizing where they have come from and returning them too me. Ok, so a lost Passport is not the end of the world, but I’m angry at my own absentmindedness and stupidity. Having to go through all the red tape of obtaining a new one is an inconvenience I would have preferred to do without.

As I turn the corner down Moon Muang/Soi 9, my street of residence, I hear the low hum of a car engine. Only it’s not a car engine, it’s the minibus and the driver is looking for me my passport in hand.

I literally could have kissed the guy, but I figured that wouldt be culturally appropriate, so I settle for a Wai and multiple Cap Cun Ca’s instead until he got back behind the wheel and drove off, slightly bemused.