Allan Milne Lees
1 min readApr 9, 2020

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Interesting to know about the SIM card issue. I adore Australia, having first gone there more than 40 years ago. But if you think the SIM thing was a hassle, you’d have lost the plot for sure 40+ years ago. When it came time to leave the country, travelers passed through passport control. Everywhere were very large signs telling everyone that it was illegal to take Australian currency out of the country and anyone passing through passport control in possession of Australian currency would be fined a very large amount. So of course we all made sure we had no Oz cash on us. Then we passed into a kind of holding area. There, we were told we had to pay the Aus$150 departure tax. But… they wouldn’t accept credit cards, cheques, or foreign currency. We were supposed to pay in the very same Australian dollars we’d just been told we were not permitted to possess. As you can imagine, this led to endless amusing conversations between travelers and Australian officials. Thankfully they stopped this particular nonsense many years ago, but it’s charming to learn there are still some booby-traps for the well-intentioned tourist!

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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