That Time I Lost My Passport

I was wondering why you tweeted about having an emergency passport…this explains it. Sorry for the headache…Hope you’re on to better things now:)

so….while living in Taiwan, my passport was in a cargo pocket of a pair of shorts that my (then girlfriend, now wife) put in the laundry. When she pulled it out of the laundry and it was in a little blue ball…well, there were a few very tense moments, but the reality is, like you say it’s really nothing more than a big inconvenience. The equivalent of a consulate here put aside their bureaucratic inefficiency for a moment and issued me a same-day emergency passport (we were traveling to Cambodia in like 5 days). I did manage to get a one-year passport.

With the length of time required, and the bureaucracy involved in getting a full-validity, 10-year passport, I haven’t bothered to take care of that yet, and that may come back to bite me as we are leaving from here to Peru in 3 days with a short stopover in the U.S….we’ll see, and I’ve got my fingers crossed.

I lost mine in a remote part of Thailand. It took about a week to get a temporary one and get on my way. The local police weren’t much help, I was really frustrated. I even tracked down the TukTuk where I believed it was lost.

That was like 7 years ago, i’m still bitter. 😉

Shit man, that must have sucked!!! I once lost my passport after all the stress of getting a new one about a month later police called me and said they found it in a park about 200 kms away from where I actually lost it…

YIKES……………..

I left my wedding gift from my father in law in that damn pocket.. I realized fast enough and ran back; got my “Rolex”.. That would have been very painful..

wow

Matt, my dear, I can only imagine how you feel because I know I get attached to my passport – I was thrilled that they give the old one back when you get a new one but you KNOW you have those stamps. It’s just a material possession. Andy tells me to just take pictures of things I like and let them go if I lose them. And even that’s not necessary.
When we travel, Andy never lets me hold on to my own passport – he is paranoid. I would never leave a passport outside my body though. As in, I would always be on my body, in a zipped pouch somewhere because if you fall asleep and if someone saw you put it in that pocket – well the world is nice and all but passports are a rare commodity and they are worth money – then they could snatch it. I don’t know; maybe I am paranoid. But I feel for you and you are far from an idiot. Big hugs!

How do I get a replacement passport? I have looked & cannot find it anywhere. The last time I used it was in 2000.

“I’m a man of routine. Whenever I fly, I put my boarding pass in my passport, and then put both of those in the magazine pocket in front of my seat. I”

not sure why you would DO that, ? why not put the passport/boarding pass into your carry-on bag/luggage? maybe in a inner pocket for easy access?

Lol Im also an idiot, but the difference is I didnt even lose that shit travelling, I lost it at home, and cant find that crap. I wonder if it was stolen… ?

Yikes!
I haven’t lost my passport but I almost did! I’m British but I live in Berlin and I was on my way “home”. I was in London for a long weekend break and I happened to have a few hours spare before I had to take my flight so I went to the museum!

I had a great time and then just before I left, I went to the bathroom and put my handbag on the hook on the back of the door. While washing my hands I realized I couldn’t see my handbag. It’s furry and pink! OMG. I began to shake and went back into the cubicles. First of all, the bathroom is always packed with queues of girls and secondly, I couldn’t remember which cubicle I had actually been in!

I checked as many as I could causing havoc to everyone then in tears I went to security who tried their best to calm me down. They went back into the bathroom with me and right at the very far end of the bathroom was my furry, pink handbag. Passport and everything intact!

I came across this blog so I thought of sharing my personal experience of losing a passport in HK airport. I traveled with 4 girls(8,6,6&3) in Sept2013. It was their first time to fly so it was a bit exciting for them. Everyone thinks it was so brave for me to do it alone leaving hubbie behind in Australia. Well, I did it with a big hiccup! I discovered I lost my passport just few minutes before boarding our connecting flight to my home country. It was a terrible feeling seeing my daughters crying with fear that we will be stuck in the airport. Since we will be boarding on Cathay Pacific flight, I looked for the transfer desk and told them about the problem. Glad that they were very helpful to find it, they rang the CX plane we boarded that was leaving in few minutes. We anxiously waited in front of the desk and few minutes later the staff called me and told me that my passport was found!!! OMG, I can’t explain how relieved I felt at that time. Our 5 passports were bunched up together inside the pocket of our carry on bag so no idea how it came out. What I can only remember is that we had such a turbulent landing that 3 of the girls were sick and vomitting at the same time that I had to grab tissues and towels from my bag — imagine how busy I was when that happened!
A CX staff accompanied us all the way to the gate. Half of the passengers had boarded already and since I had some children, we didn’t have to be in the queue so we boarded straight away.
Well, I knew I secured the passports well but obviously it wasn’t. Lesson learnt– never fly without my husband! We are more secured when he is around and that includes our passports 🙂

Recalling this story makes me ask myself… What if passport wasn’t found at all? 🙂

Thanking Matt, for the availability of this blog 🙂

Hey! do not worry about it!
I got mine one day before leaving!
I went to the passport agency in hpuston and had it mailed out and the mail man knocked at my door one day before!
pray alot!

The US State Dept has a program for crime victims, and that includes anyone who’s had their passport stolen while overseas. This status makes an embassy appt not necessary, and if you’ve got your ducks in a row (police rpt wi copies in hand, and hopefully photocopies of your stolen passport, DS-64 & DS-11, passport photo), you can go straight to the embassy and maybe have your emergency passport in as little as a couple of hours. Cost now $135, good for 1 yr, 5 visa pgs inside.

Thanks mate, it really helped me with my assignment. And I feel sorry for you.

Question. When you report your passport stolen, the new one they issue will have an expiration date 10 years after it was issued correct? Even if the lost one had less time of validity?

I’m Canadian, and my Canadian passport got stolen in the UK (in Walthamstow) not “lost,” and as the Canadian overseas embassies are even more “hard asses” than the US, I never did replace it. I’m an Irish citizen so I had to go to the Irish Embassy in London and get one of “theirs” there. Problem was, though, even though as an Irish citizen I qualified to do things like live, work, and even collect benefit there in the UK without a passport and with just some kind of “ID” card from Ireland, I could not get the time of day there without my Canadian passport. I would tell people I was Irish, show proof of that, and they’d STILL insist that I needed my Canadian passport for whatever it was I was trying to do. I was basically being treated like “American, needs a passport and a visa” not Irish. For two bloody years I put up with that. It’s funny that, because the Canadian government will issue a passport overseas but it comes out of Ottawa and that takes time. And required multiple trips to the Canadian High Commission – it got to the point where I was just “hanging out” in their library, for God’s sake. A lot. I finally gave up and went “back” to Canada on my Irish passport. Twelve years later I still haven’t dealt with the Canadian passport office. I’m in the US now and a passport isn’t required for Canadian Red Indians since we fall under the Jay Treaty meaning that all we need is our Treaty Status Card – at least, on land. I wouldn’t try to fly on it, even back to Canada. We can always drive. No matter how much the US and Canada crack down on each other’s citizens needing passports to go back and forth between the two countries, that Jay Treaty will still remain and if we are Red Indians we don’t have to. Now, after all these years, (I let my Irish one expire) I’m facing having to get another Irish passport and am thankful that they seem to be the only country left on Earth that still does them by MAIL –??! There are parts of the US and Canada where there are no Irish Embassies within 3,000 miles – so that’s good. What’s up with the other countries, though – even if their citizens are thousands of miles from the nearest of their country’s embassy, they have to go in-person? Wow. You know, those countries’ embassies should reimburse for that kind of mileage or pay for it up front!! I mean, they have to first GO to the nearest Embassy, say, Chicago or Toronto, and then stay there for the time it takes to go BACK to the Embassy and pick up the passport. That’s not only travel but accommodation, too. WOW. As to the obvious “human rights violations” issues there, I bet those countries’ governments would just say that it was their citizens’ own fault for living or being thousands of miles away from their Embassies, then. Yikes.

Posting this in case it helps anyone out in the future. Things went a little differently from some of the experiences others have posted (e.g. US), but this is one example of how things can go. YMMV.

Had some relatives from Europe (EU member) visiting me in Canada – their first-ever real trip outside their home country other than a couple of 2/3-day car trips over the border to countries that they didn\’t need passports to go to. Their flight was scheduled for 6am Tuesday. At about 7:30pm the previous day their passports (along with other ID and some other stuff) were stolen.

I live near a city (about 40 mins away) that has a consulate so, even though by the time we finished with the police it was about 10pm and we knew the consulate was closed for the day, we called it to see what time they opened the next morning and to see if maybe, MAYBE, we could get some morsel of useful information. At the end of the (long) message there was a bit that said \”In case of a serious emergency, please call 123-4567\”. So we called. Turns out that when the office is closed there is always someone on call (not necessarily working in the office) to deal with emergencies – and this qualified! 🙂

But then we were told they needed passport-sized photos (I think it was 1 each, but might have been 2) but it was now 10:30pm and virtually every store we could think of was closed except for a nearby Walmart which closed at 11pm. We took non-smiley photos in front of a white door with a cell phone and went to the Walmart to print the photos on their self-serve photo printers, but hit a wall when it turned out the machines were automatically turned off at 10pm by Walmart\’s headquarters. But after an explanation and a little begging we were able to convince the manager to make the effort to figure out how to unlock/turn one on. (The consulate staffer who answered the emergency phone also called us back at one point because she remembered that there was a photo booth at a shopping mall not particularly nearby, so it seems those pics would\’ve been good enough as well. I also think we would have been ok with home-printed photos on inkjet/laser photo paper, or maybe even regular white paper, but I don\’t know for sure. And it turned out it didn\’t matter if they were colour or black and white. They basically just needed something approximating a passport photo.)

We went to the consulate (by this time it was 12:30am), called the staffer who by that time had driven to the office from home, and the staffer let us in. She asked for my relatives\’ national ID cards but she was told they\’d been stolen along with the passports. She said that without the ID cards passports couldn\’t be issued until my relatives\’ info was confirmed by govt. officials back home and that would likely take at least a couple of days so there was no way they could fly out that day. I then pulled out copies of their passports and reminded the staffer that we\’d told her over the phone that we didn\’t have the ID cards but had copies of the passports. Yup, luckily I\’d taken photocopies of their passports when I\’d done online check-in that morning – no reason for doing so other than \”yeah, they leave in 20 hours but what the heck\”. Plus I can never remember their birthdays and it was easier to photocopy their passports than find a pen to write them down 🙂

An hour later my relatives had \”provisional passports\” – it would have been sooner but the staffer had to type out each one and every time a mistake was made she had to start a new form from the beginning. Each one was a letter/A4-sized page that contained the same info (including photo) as the info page of a passport, but each stated that it was only good for travel back home within 30 days of issue. Unlike what some others have experienced, these weren\’t regular passports or even passport-like booklets with a few pages – they were basically just emergency travel documents good enough to get them back home. Maybe if time hadn\’t been an issue and/or they were planning to travel elsewhere first/on the way they would\’ve been given something different, but I don\’t know.

The only \”glitches\” at the airport were that we couldn\’t use the self-serve kiosks (since I\’d already checked in online using the info from the original passports) and it took the check-in agent more time because it was a bit of a hassle to remove that data and replace it with the provisional passport data.

So the lessons I\’ve picked up from this affair are:

1. That advice about photocopying your passport, ID, etc. and/or scanning them and emailing to yourself and/or taking photos of them on your phone/camera? Absolutely spot-on! If my relatives hadn\’t had the photocopies with them they would\’ve had to change their flight, likely with a large fare difference on top of the change fee. (Added note: when I went to Costa Rica a few years ago tourists were advised that even though, legally, tourists had to carry passports with them, the Costa Rican authorities recognised that there was so much pickpocketing and other petty crime that they permitted tourists to carry a photocopy of their passport and leave the original in a hotel safe. I don\’t know if that\’s changed. And I don\’t know if I trust hotel safes either.)

2. Keep your vital items like passport, ID card, driver\’s license, and credit cards safe but, where possible, separate e.g. different pockets and/or if you carry a purse and insist on putting valuables in it, some in purse, some on body. That way maybe if you lose one/some of them, you still have others and aren\’t left completely ID-less and penniless. And yes, money belts/pouches are great but I\’ve found that I quickly get so used to them that I worry I might not realise it if they\’d fallen off. Trousers and shirts? Slightly greater chance I\’ll realise it if they\’ve fallen off 🙂

3. Have consulate/embassy contact numbers with you.

4. If the situation is time-critical and you\’re near enough to the consulate/embassy for it to possibly make a difference, even if it\’s after hours or a weekend or holiday, call the consulate/embassy anyway – if you\’re lucky they might have an emergency number or have some way of expediting things.

5. Might be an idea to carry one or two passport-size, passport-like (e.g. no smiling) photos when travelling, just in case. Nothing fancy. I\’m thinking the best thing is if you attend a party/event where they have free photo booths – then you don\’t even have to pay for them. Just remember to take off the sparkly hat and the boa and keep your drink out of sight. And if you don\’t need it/them by the end of the trip then you can have a little fun by walking up to people on the street, showing them the picture, and asking in a panicked voice \”Have you seen this person?\” But seriously, the photos that were required in this situation didn\’t have to be dated, let alone dated within x days/weeks/months, or signed by a guarantor/reference, or perfectly sized, or specifically colour/black & white, so it seems sometimes conditions can be a little less stringent e.g. you could maybe use photos a year or two old, as long as your appearance is similar. Again, YMMV.

Last year I *almost* lost all our passports in Mexico at the Los Cabos Airport in Mexico. After passing through immigration, our bags were X-rayed by customs. Just as we exited the secure zone, my heart just sank! I realized we had all of our bags except for my backpack that contained all our passports! I ran back to the X-ray machine while a security guard was yelling at me. Turns out the backpack’s shoulder strap got stuck in the X-ray conveyor belt mechanism. Whew, that was close one!