This is one of the saddest parts of travel

In the first week of the New Year I picked up a brand-new passport. Almost 10 years had passed in the company of my old one, and it was time to renew.

But as I delighted in the crisp, unblemished potential of my new passport, I felt an unexpected fondness for its slightly worn predecessor. We’d been through a lot together over the previous decade, and the assortment of stamps spread through its pages recalled the most memorable border crossings.

Take, for example, the stamp marking entry at Mostyska, Ukraine, in May 2016. This took place aboard a sleeper train from Krakow, Poland, to Lviv, and was memorable for two reasons. Firstly, as Ukraine uses a different rail gauge from Western Europe there was a lot of dramatic clanking mid-journey as the train’s wheels were adjusted. Secondly, Ukrainian border agents came aboard in the middle of the night and took away my passport for a long period of checking. Laced with a slight frisson of anxiety, this was cross-border train travel at its most old-school.

A few pages on is another reminder of non-air travel: a graceful small stamp over a sticker bearing an image of Mount Fuji. I received this in September, 2018, at the port of Hakata, Japan, after cruising for three hours by ferry from Busan, South Korea. The craft in question, the Beetle, was a relatively small hydrofoil vessel and I braced myself for rough seas on the Korea Strait. But that day it was as flat as a pajeon (a Korean pancake), so I enjoyed my comfy seat in the superior Green Class and kept down my complimentary sandwich.

A slightly blurred stamp near the front of the passport was obtained at Padang Besar, Malaysia, in March 2015. It’s notable for the words “Eastern and Oriental Express”. On this marvellous luxury train from Bangkok to Singapore, passport control was handled by the onboard staff when we crossed the Thailand-Malaysia border. We were apparently far too posh – and too busy eating and drinking in our deluxe carriages – for any of that administrative drudgery.

My exit stamp from OR Tambo International Airport in May, 2018, includes the silhouette of an aircraft, and marked the end of a highly enjoyable visit to South Africa. That morning I’d arrived in Pretoria on the luxury train Pride of Africa, operated by Rovos Rail. I’d spent three days travelling across the diverse nation from Cape Town, with off-train excursions along the way. Then, to reach the airport, I’d leap-frogged several generations of train by hopping aboard the Gautrain, an impressively fast commuter railway; a feat that felt like technological time travel.

An oddity is the cute and unconventional stamp gained at Vaduz, Liechtenstein, in May, 2019. It stands out on a page of its own, sporting a black oval with a red crown on top. The words “Tourist Office” inside the oval tell the full story – for this stamp from the micro-state wedged between Switzerland and Austria is only applied if you pay a small fee to that body.

Perhaps the most emotional patch of ink is the simple rectangular stamp obtained at Nadi, Fiji, in April 2022. This was the first passport stamp I’d gained since pandemic lockdowns ended. It meant a lot to be travelling overseas again, and it seemed apt it should be to somewhere as lovely as our Pacific neighbour. From the main island I boarded a ferry to a beautiful island resort; which seemed the perfect way to re-engage with the world of international travel, after such a forceful break.