Most people are envious when we mention where we’ve lived and worked. I can understand that. There’s a wanderlust that I think is part of everyone’s psyche and we are perceived as a couple/family who do what a lot of others usually only dream about. I like moving around because, I think, I have such a low boredom threshold. Or maybe it was because I was an Army brat from the time I was born and just got used to it. But there isn’t as much freedom in it as a lot of people might think.

The first two months when you set down in a new country are incredibly stressful. Besides the quest for new accommodation, adjusting to a new grocery experience, schooling and finance pressures as you’re in banking limbo, there’s also clearing the stuff that you’ve carted along with you. We used our last move as a way of cutting down our possessions and over 60% of all our current possessions (by volume) are books. However, there was also a cute scooter we just couldn’t bear to get rid of. And this is where the receiving country has you by your secondary sexual characteristics.

You see, there’s always something in your consignment that you’re worried about…that you’re not sure whether you’re going to get charged for. When we moved to Australia, it was a PC that we bought a month before. (And, yes, we ended up paying AU$400 duty on it. Yep, just the one computer. I’m still as mad as heck about that.) When we moved to Singapore, it was our scooter.

At first we couldn’t figure it, because we thought Singapore Customs might want to get it cleared as soon as possible. We even gave them an inflated value for the scooter so we could just get the damned thing through. In retrospect, that may not have been a wise move because they kept coming back with more queries for the next 2 months. I don’t know whether they thought we had spray-painted a solid gold fuel tank on the bike, or stashed illicit drugs in the battery compartment, but they refused to budge. We wrote letters and emails to the Customs Service, provided the written registration details, gave them permission to carry out a full inspection on the vehicle (with us present), and directed them to websites around the world that contained valuations, all in an effort to bolster our case.

In case anyone is wondering why we didn’t get a written valuation from Australia, well folks, we couldn’t find a single motorcycle dealership willing to give us one. The reason given was that we bought the scooter in a private sale. The valuation, we were told, was private proprietary information only available to new and existing buyers from the shop in question. WHAT?! The value of a vehicle is proprietary information??!! Exhausted by various hurdles exiting Australia, we thought we’d just dump our statutory declaration and paperwork in the hands of Singapore Customs and be done with it. But the government wasn’t finished with our little scooter yet.

Two months later coincided with the 2% rise in GST in Singapore. I didn’t think much of it until, magically, a week after the increase went through, we got our Customs bill, based on on our original customs declaration. There was nothing we could do. Complain? To whom? To the government who waited 2 months so they could nab an extra 2% on duty? To an ombudsman? Who regulates the Singapore government? Are you nuts? The removal company told us to keep quiet and pay up or who knew what might happen if we ever wanted to move again and Customs had to vet our paperwork on the way out. Sounds a bit…unsavoury, doesn’t it? Well, I’ve got some news for you. ALL governments are like that, not just Singapore. If you move around a lot, you get used to it.

That’s the glamour of travel at an international level. I have a story for you at the local level too, but that might just have to wait until next time…