Passport Renewal While Abroad

My passport was due to expire in 2023, so I decided I'd better start early on the renewal process.

 

Renewing a passport while abroad is a bit different.

Only one place in Vanuatu takes passport-quality photos.  Quite a few Chinese shops in Port Vila will take them, but they're low quality, like you'd find in a fun photo booth at an arcade.  Unfortunately the passport-quality place's lighting system wasn't working properly.  The umbrella-shrouded flashes weren't firing, resulting in their photos having heavy shadows.  The dept. of state guidelines specifically state 'no shadows'.  They also state no uniform shirts, by the way, among other rules.

So I had someone in the office take my picture with my phone, without a flash, as I stood up against a plain white wall.  Shadow problem solved, though it took a few tries to get a crisp photo.  I monkeyed with trying to crop it correctly, but was never quite happy with it.

The old dept. of state web site had a flash app which would allow you to easily upload a photo, check it against an overlay, and edit/crop it into a legit passport photo.  The site is long gone but still available on archive.org.  You won't be able to view it on any modern system, but fire up a Windows 7 VM, install an old version of Firefox with Flash, configure it to never update, and you can try it out.  It works really well, and it would be nice if they offered the same service built with HTML5.  But they stopped accepting digital photo submissions anyway, so I guess that is all moot.  Here is a demo.

 

 

Swoon over Vermeer all you like, but he never painted a compliant passport portrait.

Then I found https://passport-photo.online/, where for $15 their system automatically and magically crops your uploaded raw photo to just how the dept of state likes it, and even cleans it up a bit so there are really no, no shadows.  I brought that back to the photo place on a flash drive, and they printed it for me on their high quality printer, which unlike their lighting system, was working.

OK, got the photo.

If abroad, you have to renew your passport at an embassy.  There is a consulate in nearby Fiji, but that is not enough.  A consulate is 'embassy lite'.  You can get a travel visa there, but not an actual passport.  It looked like I would have to go to Papua New Guinea (PNG). 

Civil unrest, violence, police presence only in the capital, and continued warnings about unexploded ordnance from WWII are in the state dept. travel advisories for PNG.  Only last week did the travel advisory change from "Level 4: Do Not Travel" to "Level 3: Reconsider Travel."   I've never been there.  But reading about PNG, I did learn of the state department's shorthand term for "unexploded ordnance", which is UXO.

I contacted the PNG embassy about traveling there, and learned I could mail in my passport with my renewal application instead.  The bummer there is that it is still $260 to send something as small as a passport to PNG.  And you have to include a prepaid shipping envelope for return shipping.  $520 total.  Yikes.

To renew by mail, you have to pay the $130 passport renewal fee first on the U.S. gov't "pay.gov" site, and include a printout of your receipt with the application.  I couldn't fill out the payment form as Vanuatu wasn't listed as a country on it.  I contacted the PNG embassy for help, who sent me a new link to a slightly different URL where I could pay for my passport from Vanuatu.

Then I got lucky, and found that a consular officer from the PNG embassy happened to be making the rounds, so to speak, to places like Vanuatu, to assist Americans with this sort of stuff, and maybe whatever else the CIA had him working on, who knows?.  I met him at a coffee shop in town, gave him my application, passport and return shipping envelope, saving $260.  I was told I should have my new passport in about a month.

All in all I got away with this for pretty cheap, and and the PNG embassy staff were consistently prompt and helpful with all of my questions.  The process is DIY, and not as straightforward as it is in the U.S.