Hold fast the passport

One of the worst things you can do in the Arab world, a wise colleague declared with only a minimum of exaggeration, is to lose your passport

One of the worst things you can do in the Arab world, a wise Iraqi-American colleague declared with only a minimum of exaggeration, is to lose your passport. "If the house is on fire, that's all you go back inside for," he said. "Let the jewellery burn." In all the years since she first ventured outside her native France, my wife has never lost hers. Or, at any rate, she hadn't until three days before a booked flight from Abu Dhabi to London. In fact, if she is right, even this blemish on her passport-owning record can be blamed on her old man.

What happened next, between sudden realisation of loss and planned departure, is not for the squeamish. My colleague was right. We discovered that to have any hope of sorting it out, you need the stamina of an ox, the patience of a saint, the elbows of an opening day of Harrods sale shopper, wads of dirhams and a tankful of petrol. The process began simply enough at the consular section of the French embassy, where the charming and efficient Françoise assured us that an emergency passport could be issued that morning on production of a declaration of loss from a nearby police station.

It was too simple to be true. The police station sent us to the Immigration Department. After a lot of upstairs/downstairs activity, shuffling between this desk and that, one office and another, we emerged with a very official-looking document. But we had barely begun. It had to be taken to the Sharia court for more signatures, and from there to the police station at Khalifa City for another. Next stop was a newspaper office to insert a small ad. And back again to immigration, where the declaration needed for the French was finally issued. It was already too late to return to Françoise, but we did spend a further 50 minutes jostling with others, in the absence of a formal queue, on what turned out to be a needless but costly procedure in the typing and photocopying section.

The following day, the emergency passport was duly handed over. But it now needed an official stamp before it could be used to leave the country. Upstairs/downstairs began all over again as we resumed our role as the parcel in pass-the-parcel. Two or three hours later, having seen no fewer than 10 officials, we were given a scrap of paper containing a message in Arabic. I stared at it in disbelief.

Do not mock scraps of paper. It informed airport immigration that a letter had been faxed. The letter was found, and we sailed through to our flight. And let none of this be taken as criticism of the officials we encountered. Almost without exception, they were polite, understanding and anxious to help; if the system has endless layers of bureaucracy, that is not their fault. And nor, as any of them might have pointed out but didn't, is it their fault if some clot planning a trip overseas contrives to lose the very piece of identification he or she requires most.
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