Third Passport Stamps

This passport, unlike the others has different stamps from countries other than the Philippines.


The stamps from 2003 are from a trip I took with my parents to visit my ailing grandmother before she passed away. There are immigration stamps for Korea because we had a 16-hour stop-over there. Our trip was last-minute since my grandmother's health was not doing so well, so my mother took the earliest tickets available. Since we had flown Korean to the Philippines before and stayed only for a brief 3-4 hours, she thought we were in for the same journey. But we were not. Apparently, there are two flight to Seoul daily from Los Angeles and we took the earlier of the two, landing us in Seoul with 16 or so hours of waiting ahead of us.

The stamps from February 2005 are from the trip we made to make arrangements and prepare for our move to the Philippines later that May. As the stamp shows, we moved to the Philippines from the States on 23 May 2005.


The US immigration stamp is from my February 2005 trip to the Philippines. I remember expressly asking the immigration officer to chop my passport, to which he agreed. I gained the confidence to do so after asking the Canadian immigration officer at Niagara Falls to stamp my passport (even if they don't need to stamp US passports for land entries).

The other stamps are from my 2007 trip to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Singapore uses a hexagonal stamp at the airport, which I take is a special stamp for social visitors allowed to stay for 90 days. The same day I arrived in Singapore, I went straight to the Woodlands border gate to cross over the bridge to the other side, Johor Bahru, Malaysia. We cross the bridge by bus and then waited for the bus to reach the end of its route. When we reached the terminal, we hopped onto the bus back to the border gate and returned to Singapore to check into our hotel room. This was the first time I would be doing something "crazy" just to get passport stamps and later I would learn that my antics would pay off.

Since we were leaving for Kuala Lumpur on a train (Air Asia was not yet so big and we also wanted to take in the sights of Malaysia along the way), we had to board at the Tanjong Pagar station, which was somewhere in the middle of Singapore. The company that services this station is Malaysian-owned Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) or Malaysian National Railways and the only destinations from this station are all found in Malaysia. Therefore, it is understood that if you are to board a train here, you are headed for Malaysia. The thing is, Malaysia seems to claim the strip of land on which the railroad tracks are laid and there is some dispute over ownership of the land on which the tracks are laid. But Singapore, of course, will not agree to this. So what happens is, you board the train until some part of Singapore that is close to the shore (Singapore is an island) and then you are all made to get off and go through Singapore immigration exit procedures, and then you board the train again. Once you board the train, you never have to get off again until you reach your destination. At first I thought it was strange that we never stopped to go through Malaysian immigration, and then I thought we might have to go through some immigration booth in Kuala Lumpur, but that was not the case. I would learn upon my departure from Kuala Lumpur that, as far as Malaysian immigration is concerned, my port of entry was Tanjong Pagar. You can read from the KL airport exit stamp, "Masuk melalui KTM Tanjong Pagar" or "Entered through Tanjong Pagar KTM..." and then the date. The immigration officer asked no questions about it, so I guess this is really Malaysian policy. The thing is, what if you are not supposed to enter Malaysia? What if you don't have the visa or what if you are blacklisted? Is this a way to sneak in without having to sneak in? Well anyway, thank heavens that I insisted on making the absurd trip to Johor Bahru so now I have a "Johor Bahru" entry and exist stamp!

Notice also that the immigration stamp applied at the Woodlands entry point is the generic stamp and that the number of days allowed to remain is filled in by the immigration officer by hand. No special stamp design at the land border, I guess. It seems immigration officers always neglect land borders: at Canadian and Mexican land entry posts, they never stamp your passport! But I guess it would matter a lot if you were passing from South Korea to North Korea by land.


Here are the stamps from my Hong Kong-Macau trip later that same year. Later on, I will post more stamps from HK and Macau and you can compare how the ones in HK have changed and the ones in Macau are still the same after 2.5 years. The HK immigration stamps do not indicate on the text the port of entry used by the visitor, but the color says it all. Black is for the airport and green was for the seaport (no it is purple).

The 11 October stamp is from an overnight business trip I took to Hong Kong a few days before my vacation trip. Note that 11 October 2007 was also the day the A380 was at the airport for its test landing and, yes, I did see it there. I unfortunately did not have the chance to see it land or take off, though. The May arrival stamp is from my arrival from Malaysia.

If you have been observant, you would have noticed that Philippine immigration stamps include the flight number of your arrival or departure flight. Notice on the 22 October departure stamp that there is no indication. This is because this was the time when I went through immigration without the officer even checking his computer! Yes, it seemed that there was some kind of system glitch. I was surprised that when I went through the check-in counter and headed for my gate, there were terribly long lines at immigration. This was the first time I had seen this, especially because it's not like MNL is like LAX where you have a flight departing every five minutes. We were stuck at the back of the line for something like fifteen minutes, and then the line started moving up so quickly! I was amazed at the sudden speed and then learned that the officers were, instead of individually scanning the passports, just stamping away quickly. I guess they were under pressure since some flights were already boarding! This was a chance for any fugitives or those on the immigration black lists to escape the country! I actually have a hunch that maybe there as some foul play and that maybe the Bureau Immigration was in on it and purposely processed the passports without checking them. Was this some kind of orchestrated corruption taking place once more? Or am I just too suspicious of Philippine government agencies?

Now, moving on, looking to the right half of the scan, you will see that all the five chops from three different authorities are from 25 October 2007! Include the HK stamp on top of page 12 and you have 6 all in one day! This was because I went on a one-day trip to Macau from HK that day and then returned to the Philippines that same evening.


This lone stamp from Canada is from my Toronto-Niagara Falls-New York trip in 2004. We flew from LA to Toronto and, since we were flying in this time as opposed to driving in like I did the last time I visited Canada in 2000, I got an immigration stamp! This one is from YYZ, or Pearson International Airport. The Niagara Falls stamp that I mentioned earlier is actually on Page 11, but the ink faded and the Malaysian immigration officer did not see it and stamped right on top of it! Today, the Niagara Falls stamp is almost invisible!


This last stamp was a bonus from my overnight trip to HK. Because I also hold a Philippine passport which I also present when I leave and arrive in the Philippines, officers often inscribe the letters "BB" for "Balikbayan status entry" or "w/PP" to indicate my dual citizenship. However, for this trip I decided not to present my Philippine passport so I received a special "restricting" date stamp which shows the day I must leave the Philippines (US nationals are allowed to stay only for 21 days). In the past, they used to write in "21 days," but now they actually stamp the date, which I think is awesome!