Losing your passport in China is a serious matter
Series of steps:
- Arrived in Beijing around midday Friday
- Taxied to a hotel to have lunch with a colleague and leave luggage
- Taxied to a third-party office for a meeting
- Two hour meeting
- Taxied back to lunch hotel to collect luggage
- Taxied to my real hotel for the weekend
- Upon arrival, discovered my travel document wallet (including passport) was missing - including USD notes, Euro travelers cheques, aVISA card, and every airline and hotel membership card I had
Having traveled so much in the past few years, I’d become complacent and didn’t even have a photocopy of my passport handy, nor the numbers of my travelers cheques written down, etc (in case you’re wondering, the cheques are still left over from my trip to Europe 4 years ago).
The hotel actually wouldn’t/couldn’t let me check in without a passport, which made things worse. They had to phone the police station to report the loss, but things got worse because the police couldn’t find a record of my visa to enter the country - because I didn’t have one. The reason was that I was travelling on an APEC Business Travel Card which allows you to come and go without a visa - but of course that card was missing too. So the police kindly requested the hotel to escort me to the police station for “questioning”.
The hotel guy kept asking he about my steps and reminded me three different times to “tell the truth” to the police guys when they questioned me. We arrived and waited for the police chief to be available (I worried about how long that was going to take) before my colleague who I’d had lunch with and attended the meeting with phoned to say that my wallet had been found in the meeting room we’d been in (a lucky break, as it was 7pm by this time). What was then strange was that the police still didn’t want to let me leave as they didn’t believe me! Eventually things were sorted and I was allowed to go and my colleague arrived an hour later, having picked up my passport.
So, touch wood, I am still lucky to have had nothing majorly bad happen to me after all this travel. Except for last week when I lost or had my iPod nano stolen in India 