Passport Photos

It's a lot of "fun" trying to get acceptable photos. Last week I went to my local American Automobile Association (AAA) office to get an International Driver's Permit (IDP). It's just a translation of your license, which is valid for 1 year. I had to take 2 passport-sized photos with me, which I did.

But I was told they wouldn't be accepted because I had long hair and a beard in them, but short hair and no beard now. That's absurd, because it's the same photo used in both of my passports, and there's no requirement that you don't alter your appearance from your passport photo. Somehow border guards can crack the code.

Amusingly, my California driver's license shows short hair and no beard, but the AAA person wasn't even looking at my CA license at the time. What happens if I grow long hair and a beard before I travel? Was he just trying to upsell me on a $9.99 photo?

We had a hell of a time getting the UK passport authorities to accept the photos we sent in for her passport; they recommend getting your photos taken at an "official" UK location where the digital photos are identified by a code you send in. Well, we happened to be traveling through Australia during this timeframe, so we were able to stop at an Australian Post Office, which supposedly had the same "digital" system, but instead of a code to send to the UK authorities, they handed us printed photos and a web link. Thankfully I was able to use the web link to download the photo and upload it to the UK site, where it was approved almost immediately, and the new passport arrived back at our home before we returned from our trip. But there's no user-obvious criteria that was being used to reject the SEVERAL rounds of photos we had sent to the UK earlier.

Unless you are traveling to some weird place almost everywhere will accept a standard driver's license if it has English on it.

Vietnam famously doesn't. You can rent a motorbike without showing any sort of license, but in the most touristic areas (eg Ha Giang loop) the police picks out foreigners to check and get their bribe.

And I have a vague remembrance (take with a whole rock of salt) that foreigners from many countries technically _cannot_ legally drive there even with an IDP, because there's 2 competing IDP standards or something like that. But I'd guess you'd be fine

Yeah, the actual law is irrelevant most of the time, since it's just a shakedown. I did encounter one cop who knew about the 2 different IDP conventions and was able to extract the coffee money even if you had one. If you don't want to pay, offering to accompany them to the station to pay there (and get a receipt) usually works, especially if you're out in the countryside, since they don't want to give up on the chance to stop a bunch of other people. If you do choose to pay, they'll usually share your license plate on a WhatsApp group with the other local police if you ask them to, so you won't get hassled again for the rest of the day.