Losing Our passport in a forgein country

Losing our passport in a foreign country was awful; we broke nearly every rule in my Traveler’s Rulebook, and here is our sorry story.

I left home with a brand new passport, and due to a run of inconvenient events before leaving Australia (this is an excuse), I had not copied our passports, and this is just the start of the saga.

The Day Losing our Passports changed our Holiday.

Our day started by catching a train from Munich in Germany to Vienna in Austria.
It’s about a five and a half-hour train ride. We boarded our train in the early morning in Munich. Soon after the train pulled out of the station, we had the conductor come through and stamp our tickets. The next stop was Salzburg, and the same thing happened. I wasn’t expecting to get our ticket checked after Salzburg, but we did need to, so we went through the process again.

After the next stop in Austria, I automatically prepared for when the conductor came through again, but the conductor walks straight past us, and I thought, beautiful. Zipping my wallet back up, I dropped it into my bag, thinking it had made it at least partly into the bag.
Typically I would physically put it right into my bag, at least, if not zip my bag back up. But because I was in the middle of doing something, and it was the third interruption, I got Slack.
I must have moved my bag in a way that my wallet fell out without me noticing.

The Travel Wallet

The Moment your heart stops – Losing your Passport

With the excitement that comes with arriving in a new city, we got off the train and got on a tram. It was on opening my bag to get some change to pay that we discovered no wallet.
Thankfully the stations were close together, so getting off one tram and catching another was easy. It may have been 40 seconds between the trams. We were standing back on the platform within 10 minutes and found no trains at all.

I have to say we found no one helpful in our moment of need.
We went to the information counter feeling terrible and in the middle of an anxiety attack, and the curt behaviour of the attendant just made the enormity of the situation worse.
Their response was to throw a tiny bit of paper at us with the opening hours that the lost and found office and send us on our way to fend for ourselves.

One crucial thing I forgot to say was all this happened at 10:30 am on a Saturday, and lost and found did not open until 7:30 am Monday.

We had the whole weekend with no answers.

Finally Some Compassion

We headed to our hotel with Phil’s driver’s license for ID, praying that would be enough to check in.
We explained our situation, showed his license, and they were happy. Arriving so early at our hotel, we expected our bag would have to go into storage until later in the day, but we were dearly hoping that we could access our room.
On this occasion, we could get early access to our room. This was great news because we both needed a shower, a place to process what had happened and to come up with some solutions.

With some time to clean up and process our situation, we made the most of the day and headed out to explore this amazing city.

The Plan

Gaining access to the embassy website, we learned a little about how we could replace our passports. We made an appointment on Tuesday because we had something booked on Monday. As the day went on, we decided it was more important that we sort out the passports and cancelled our tour for Monday.

Later that night, I decided to head to the police station to report them missing just in case we need to make an insurance claim.

Even though the officer was not able to do a report, this man was the first lovely encounter we had in this situation; he was very compassionate and informative, even to the point of looking up the magistrate’s office number.

*In Austria, if you lose something, the police can’t help you. If my wallet had gone missing as a result of theft, I could’ve put a police report in, but I had lost it, so I needed to go to the magistrate’s office to report it.

The day of truth

Arriving at the lost and found office at about eight o’clock, we spoke to a lovely young guy. He explained how things worked and told us to come back at two o’clock. Because of my Blog on Pickpockets, I had a photo of the wallet to help identify it. Phil had also put in an online report over the weekend; we had done all we could here for now.

Deciding we wanted to be prepared, we found a place to get passport photo’s taken at the Hauptbahnhof. Druckraum is a small printing shop in the station shopping area. It paid off doing it the way we did it as we needed to get Phil’s photo redone, and they did it for free and were very helpful.

It was with nerves and uncertainty we arrived at the Australian embassy. The lady we saw at the Australian Embassy was lovely; I can’t tell you how at peace she put us as she explained exactly what needed to be done.

Our plan as we left the embassy was, that she was going to start her end of the process, and we took away the paperwork to fill out. The passports were not being cancelled until we had gone back to the lost and found office and confirmed them lost.

Once you cancel a passport, there is no going back, but we would be ready to get some temporary passports if needed.

What is lost is found.

We arrived at 2:30 pm at the lost and found. When the young man looked up and saw us, he had a big grin on his face. He went out and came back with a package that did not look like the size of my travel wallet. I must say my heart sank.

Our passports, my two cards, driver’s license and a few other contents wrapped in our ticket and hotel voucher.

Someone had decided that they needed my wallet and the few euros that were in it. I am thankful they had the forethought to package our most valuable belongings in the A4 papers to make sure we got everything important back.
We went back to the hotel and emailed the embassy as planned to let her know all was resolved, and we found our passports.

Our drama had the best possible ending. We got our passports back, we got my credit card returned, and none of it had been used.

The long and the short of Losing our Passports

It was stressful. It was just over 48 hours from beginning to end, and not knowing what would happen until we got to the embassy deepened the stress levels.
There was the possibility if we needed to get a passport, we would have had to spend an extra night in Vienna due to the turnaround. We were travelling on to Budapest, so this was not a biggie. The exercise would have cost us lost accommodation in Budapest, and we would have needed to pay for the same night in Vienna. But thankfully, we will never know how that had to play out.

I will be forever grateful for the comfort and compassion of a public servant in the Australian Embassy in Vienna; her words and attitude changed how we felt in those moments.
The young man in the train lost and found office kindly gave us a plan to work with and a small amount of hope that by early afternoon we would have answers, and we did. After days of uncertainty, the comfort was more than mere words.

Why Have a copy of your passport?

In this case, having a copy of a passport was not the be-all, but what if I had fallen over and ended up in a hospital or got myself into trouble with the law? I had no ID. Not having my documents was really unsettling. Knowing I was unable to prove my identity could have prolonged my getting the right help was always in the back of my mind.

The embassy does its own checks. I had logged our trip with Smart Traveller, but the two departments don’t cross over, and without my passport number, I could not access it. Having copies would have given her the right starting point, but she still had to do all her back-end stuff to verify everything.

Here is what the passport page on the government website says

“Keep a photo or photocopy of your passport’s photo page, or at least a record of its number and expiry date. This can be useful for your own reference and in certain travel situations.”

When you are staying in one place, keep your originals safe in the hotel. Carrying a copy is a sensible option, allowing you to have your ID but not running the risk of losing the originals.

Want to learn more?

The loss of your passport is awful, but there are resources from the Australian Government, visit these sites to learn more.

Visit here to learn more about protecting your passport

For help, if your Passport goes missing, Click here

 

This was not a pleasant lesson to learn, but I am happy to talk it through if you want to know any more, and I know that having gone through it, I am even more equipped to assist my beautiful clients.

I Know without Phil by my side and the support of people back home, this ordeal would have been hell. Once we found the right people on the ground to help, this made all the difference.

With a plan, Phil and I managed to enjoy those two days. We explored Vienna, and our day trip to Melk Abbey and that region of the Danube was a marvellous distraction.

 

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