APEC Card = Get Out Of Jail Queues Free

The Australian Government Department of Immigration and Citizenship (God bless their Aryan hearts) issues a Business Travel Card for the countries in the Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC). This gives a pre-approval of any visa requirements for a wide range of peri-Pacific countries. This means I don't have to apply for a visa for most of these places any more, I just rock up at the Immigration Control, choose the Diplomatic/APEC queue and skip the long lines.

Brilliant.

If you're an Aussie expat a frequent traveller from an APEC country and are frequently visiting a lot of other APEC countries (you don't HAVE to be either an Aussie or an expat - my bad, thnx Laurence) and you don't have one of these cards, you're a bloody idiot. I use it when I go to Indonesia to play golf and ignore the $10 visa fee.

My current card expires in August, so at the moment I am filling in the forms for renewal. I just came to this question:

How do your activities, while travelling, relate to trade, investment or business development? If insufficient space, attach an additional page.

Mmm. My activities... Special massages, short-term girl-friends (singular and plural), VERY short-term girlfriends (singular and plural), pole-dancing in go-go bars whilst drunk at 4am, grievous offenses to most civilized sensibilities, generalized unethical and immoral debauchery involving nudity or not, with some nihilistic hedonism thrown in for good measure... Things you wouldn't, as a rule, do in your home country. Surely they know what expats get up to in the post-colonial (though you wouldn't realize the 'post-' part) tropics?

Additional page? I'd need to attach my novel!

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Oh, oh, they mean what I do AT WORK while travelling! Phew, I thought I was going to have to own up to a range of misdeeds and maybe compromise my application, not to mention my reputation!

E@L