Passports

Renewing a passport while you are in a foreign country is like playing roulette. You never know if it's going to work, when it will be returned, or how to do it. Surrendering your passport means you are stranded in a foreign country until you get your new passport. You take your chances and hope for the best.

First stop is the American Consulate in Curacao.  The Dutch Caribbean isn't important enough to have a full embassy (which is located in the Netherlands) so you deal with a Consulate on another island. The Consulate only comes to Bonaire twice a year to conduct business and they require a scheduled appointment to turn in all your paper work.

The consulate is not available by phone. All correspondence is done via email.  I send emails and the consulate sends standard form responses back and refers me to the website. If you have questions not covered in the form emails you have to send an emails with a subject line of: REQEST FOR SPECIFIC INFORMATION.  In return you get a one word response to your request. Their customer service to American citizens is unbelievably bad.  How busy can they be when there are only about 1,500 Americans on the islands they serve?

The consulate requires that the renewal fee be paid with a cashiers check. The banks on Bonaire do not issue cashiers checks.  We have to get the checks from the States. They have to be addressed specifically to the consulate disbursing office.  Our first attempt worked well as our visiting family hand carried the checks to us.  Then we noticed that they were incorrectly addressed.  We enlisted the help of some visiting friends from Georgia to get new cashier checks and bring them to us when they come for vacation. Crisis averted.

Our appointment is in May at which time we get to pay an additional $50 each for the Consulate representative to verify our signatures.  They will take this amount in cash...probably use the cash for cocktails at the airport.

I often complain about the crazy Dutch Government processes.  Just to be clear, the American Consulate processes are just as crazy and difficult to follow. Governments are the same the world around.