How to (Really) Recover Your Lost or Stolen Passport Abroad
Dedicating this inaugural post to Anthony Bourdain, my friend who didn’t know we were friends yet. You were a large source of inspiration for the way I travel – and live in general – which inevitably leads to rich and rewarding experiences, like the one outlined below.
Merci, et bon voyage.
In April, 2017, I was traveling abroad in India, and this happened…
Worst-case scenario.
Traveling on a bus from Jodhpur to Udaipur, during a restroom break in the middle of the trip, I made the discovery: I was robbed. And I wasn’t robbed while I was away going to the restroom, I realized I was robbed before exiting the bus, meaning it happened in route.
I no longer had money, a way to get money, and I no longer had my passport – in another country. Also stolen was the visa, which at least during a trip is virtually as important as the passport. And finally, to make matters worse, I travel alone, and had no one to rely on.
Those three things – currency, identity, and support – are fundamental to survive in human society. Relatively speaking, one can get by without any of the two, but never all three. If one doesn’t have all three, they’re either dead or not born yet.
And somehow I found myself without all three. I was out of the system, then, and so it was as if I didn’t exist at all. This made life not so much fun.
So, let’s get this out of the way:
‘K.
I want to share how to recover from this worst-case scenario. Specifically, I want to share how to really recover your identity outside your home country, as this is far less straightforward than getting money or a helping hand – and far more difficult – and any coverage of the topic I find wholly inadequate.
What do I mean?
Your country’s embassy will outline a series of steps and documents for you to complete in order for you to recover your lost or stolen passport and visa unique to the host country you’re in. Meaning, for instance, the American embassy will tell it’s American citizen something for India, which is different from what they’d tell them if this same thing happened in Canada, or North Korea.
But while these ‘how-to’ instructions are covered, as I learned the hard way, they’re only part of the story. They’re just not comprehensive at all, and severely lacking – they’re lousy. That’s what I mean by “inadequate,” and that’s what I mean by sharing how to “really” recover – I’m going to identify and fill in this gap of knowledge.
The thing is though, this gap is something all countries have in common, too. So while I may be American, and the backdrop may be India, my personal experience should be indicative of what will happen to any national in any country. Likewise, my lessons learned should be helpful for just about anybody.
I feel this knowledge gap concept may be a bit nebulous, however, so I came up with a framework to help us analyze and break down our understanding. I call it, The Chasm, and it will serve as an outline for the rest of the post – my insights and guidance.
The Chasm
For us to get from Point A to Point B – from no passport and visa in possession to passport and visa back in possession – from where we’re standing now, the path forward appears to be straight and level terrain from what our embassies have shared with us – no knowledge gaps at all! However, if you just do a little probing, you’ll soon realize your understanding is actually quite hollow, and pocketed. There are few definitive facts to get us from one side to the other.
I call these definitive facts Know Peaks. They’re the straight and level ground making up our path to recovering our passport and visa. The number of Know Peaks depends on what is exactly shared by our embassies, which isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, and they’re so narrow because they’re highly specific. Just look at the names of our Know Peaks, and this will make more sense.
How do you complete the document by signing when you don’t have a printer? How do you make your payment when you don’t have money? How do you visit a certain place when it’s on the other side of the country? You can go down a rabbit hole, and come up with a thousand questions unaddressed anywhere.
Put another way: For there to be isolated peaks, that means there are some deep, wide Chasms in between. These are our knowledge gaps, and this is what we’re interested in – the other part of the story.
This is only the beginning, however. I said earlier we were going to identify the knowledge gaps, but now we have to fill them in to get across. Depending on where we’re at on our journey to recovering our passport and visa, these gaps are filled with either expectations or reality. While reality is what ultimately matters for us, our expectations are valuable, too, providing us a benchmark with which to measure or qualify reality. Naturally we have to start here.
Expectations
Anytime we spot a knowledge gap, we immediately plug it with our expectations, or as I like to call it, Rainbow Filler.
Pssh… We don’t need every single fact ahead of time to know what our path forward is! Logic, intuition, and our basic assumptions will suffice for getting us peak to peak, and eventually, to the other side.
What exactly is this rainbow made out of, and what is it filling in? To answer that, let’s go back to where we left off at the bus.
My expectations at the time of how this would play out next I bet is more or less how you believe it will play out.
Local Police and Host Government
You expect the local police and host government to help get your life back to normal, namely by retrieving your passport with the visa. If they cannot retrieve those in a timely manner, they’re there to help you exit the country and get back home. You’re the victim after all, and just kinda stuck without their cooperation and service. Definitely goes without saying, but you also expect them to be moral, competent, and benevolent. They will be your hero.
Your Embassy
Your expectations of your embassy? Well, as a U.S. citizen, the expectations of my embassy are especially high. We’ve read the news. President Bill Clinton’s gone to North Korea to help one dude. We’ve sent our entire military to rescue individual hostages across the Middle East. Now for them to handle a petty thief and misplaced paperwork? Whereas the local police and host government are working on the resolution to bring your life back to normal, your embassy is making your life as normal as possible in the interim. They’ve got clout, a war chest for someone in your position, they’re proactive, available 24/7, and putting you as their only priority. The American Embassy is the shit!
Businesses
Companies may be out to make a profit, but you may have heard of some giving discounts or free services for people in desperate need. Think, during a natural disaster, a grocery store donates their entire stock. Whatever it is, you wouldn’t expect a business to take advantage of you and profit off your emergency situation – especially when it was no fault of your own. The customer comes first.
Murphy’s Law
Murphy is just awful. After all, he’s the reason your passport and visa are no longer in your possession. But with the local police and host government, your embassy, and businesses being totally rad, you have nothing to worry about anymore – everything happens as it should.
To summarize, your expectations of recovering your identity abroad is that it’s easy, and it’s easy because you know you’re going to be taken care of, and it’s predictable.
It sure is a brilliant rainbow.
Reality
Time to start walking.
Eff.
It never fails; dramatically let down by our expectations again. We forget we can’t walk on rainbows.
When I first learned I was robbed, I was panicked and super bummed because my favorite souvenir – the passport, with a bouquet of colorful stamps and visas – was ostensibly gone forever, but after I started walking through the process, the source of this anxiety and depression began to shift towards just trying and failing to leave the country and go home. The primary factor for the shift is that in reality, the system – via its representatives, such as the embassy – is not only indifferent to you and your situation, it can be actively working against you. Ironically, instead of helping onboard you back into society, they’re putting up obstacle after obstacle in your way because they don’t trust you. Recovering my stolen passport and visa was fast becoming a lofty dream, but even acquiring an emergency or temporary passport and visa – the back-up plan to recovering your identity abroad – was proving to be an impossibility.
Moreover, you’re hearing that running drum music in your head because you have a life to get back to, and you can’t spend unplanned weeks, or months, neglecting your responsibilities. You gotta hustle. The jungle of red tape is daunting by itself, but when time is factored in, it makes the difference between a headache and an existential threat.
To put this all another way, I soon saw the path to recovering the passport and visa was not made of a brilliant rainbow, but of something else entirely.
The path to really recovering your passport and visa, and what’s needed to plug your gap of knowledge, is Complete Bullshit. What exactly is this bullshit made out of, and what is it filling in? To answer that, let’s go back to where we left off at the bus, and I’ll share how it really plays out.
Plan A – Recover my original passport and visa, and try to board my original flight
Plan B – Forget all that, just obtain emergency passport and new visa, and book first flight home
Reflections
If I traversed The Chasm before you, this last section of the post is me shouting back over that raging river of bullshit how best to navigate to my side – to safety.
Local Police and Host Government
The police to you will seem at best indifferent, or at worst incompetent. Regardless, they’re never going to do enough for you. Check your expectations. In some developing countries of the world, you may even have to deal with corrupt officials. For nationals from developing countries, for you this likely will be easier to cope with than for those from developed countries, as you likely already deal with it in some way, shape, or form in your own country.
To those from more developed countries, learning to bribe is weird, but it’s actually part of the game, and “acceptable.” Not ‘do it openly’ acceptable, but like ‘open secret’ acceptable. Never walk in with such assumptions, though. The official you’re dealing with will make it obvious.
On the flip side, if this situation happens to you in a more developed nation, expect more formalities, but equal parts indifference. You may be the victim, but you’ll always be met with suspicion, no matter what your story and supporting evidence is.
If your passport is just merely lost, search like hell for it to avoid unnecessary bullshit. If stolen, of course never surrender hope, but be realistic. Regardless of either scenario, if it can’t be located, you’ll have to deal with the host government for a visa.
Here your embassy may have given you guidance for dealing with the host government, but in mapping the Chasm for Know Peaks, realize there are new, uncharted frontiers. For instance, your embassy may list what the host government will demand of you, but it doesn’t account for the random, or arbitrary steps. Speaking to my personal experience, the U.S. embassy told me that a C-form – a long, meticulous, and obnoxious document meant to capture details on each and every place of residence inside India – was required only if I overstayed my visa, and even in such a case, I could get out of it by writing a letter stating that I do not have such details available. My visa was for maybe forty-five days, and I was two weeks in, yet the FRRO still demanded I fill out the C-form, and rejected my letter.
For anybody anywhere, you will suffocate in the bureaucracy of things.
Finally, fair or unfair, it helps tremendously if you know someone.
Your Embassy
I guarantee your embassy will be your biggest disappointment in all of this.
Just in case it’s not clear what a joke is and what’s fact in the above comic strip, yes, the US Embassy only helps on 9-5 schedule, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays – even for emergencies. All that’s available 24/7 is a phone line – that may or may not work – which a local national picks up. If an emergency, you’re transferred to an American diplomat – which may or may not go through – who will jot down notes about what you share, and will give general guidance. In your head, you’re thinking that because you’re talking to them, you’re finally saved, but in reality it’s like calling your parents to vent about a break-up – there’s nothing they can really do, their response tantamount to, “Well, that sucks… sorry. Would you like a hug?”
Moreover, the embassy can only help you if you visit them in person, which blows my mind because you need your passport and visa in most cases to travel around your host country, from airlines to buses. The fact that they don’t come to you puts you in an almost impossible spot. Not really illustrated above, but it was challenging getting scene to scene.
On payments, it’s still nuts to me that they won’t help you (i.e. give you a temporary or emergency passport) unless you pay, and pay now. Also something I can’t get over, when you’ve got no one, and no funds, they make you wait at least a week to help financially, even for the necessary things such as food, water, and shelter. Surely there’s a better way.
I’m uncertain if my experience with my embassy is “normal” – how things always have been – or if my experience just stems from the current Administration’s ineptitude, and/or poor policy. For example, I have several friends working in the State Department, and I’m aware they’re dreadfully short-staffed, in part because the current Administration has enacted a hiring freeze. How much this reverberated through the system and affected me is unknown, but I think ultimately it’d be better to not expect much of anything from your embassy.
Businesses
Should I have expected to be taken advantage of? Sure. But the way I see it, if you assume something, or go with conventional wisdom, you already got your answer. Done. It’s over. But if you at least try, you may see things aren’t so certain. I’ve seen this too many times now, and so I live by this. I will always question things, and figure it out for myself.
Specific to recovering my identity abroad, I found it absurd I couldn’t board my original flight with just the supporting documents and accompanying police report. Everyone said not to bother, and just go straight to my embassy to initiate the standard process; without the original, physical copy of my passport, they claimed I wouldn’t even get through the front doors of the airport blocked by military guards. It wouldn’t hurt, so I continued.
When I arrived at the airport, I explained to a guard my situation… and he let me in. Then I made my way to the Cathay Pacific desk, and explained to an admin my situation. He was unsure, so he called over another admin to explain my situation… He was unsure, too. They both called over their manager, explained the situation, and, after a 30-second pause… that manager decided against printing my boarding pass. On my way back out of the airport, I happened to pass the same guard who let me in. He thought it was outrageous I wasn’t being let through, so much so that he actually left his post to escort me to my plane!
Unfortunately, in those 15-20 minutes, the Cathay Pacific desk closed, and the admins left to handle boarding the final flight out that night. I was so freaking close, which alone should satisfy my point, but also, because the military guard couldn’t argue with the admins directly, he did manage to get me a card of a special contact from Cathay Pacific, who, a few months later, was able to reimburse me for my missed flight.
Murphy’s Law
Murphy of Murphy’s Law is a trash jester, always out to antagonize us, and make us a fool. In normal, everyday life, he can be tolerated, if not outright avoided, as you’ve got down a solid routine. It’s when you’re in an unpredictable situation – new, and outside of routine – that Murphy’s most influential. Losing your identity in another country is about as unpredictable as it can get. Get a bit of control back from Murphy by establishing some structure.
Lost verses Stolen
Both scenarios suck equally. If your passport and visa were stolen from you, however, you have the added handicap of hearing everyone use incorrect synonyms to describe your situation (e.g. “lost,” or “missing”), which imply a certain incompetence on your part, almost mocking or belittling the crazy struggle you’re going through. Annoying.
The Chasm Framework
Now to get a little more meta.
This whole time we’ve been talking about identifying and filling in the knowledge gap around a lost or stolen passport and visa abroad, but this Chasm framework can be applied to about anything in life in general, which is another worthy take-away. Specifically, we could do a better job at recognizing our understanding of a path forward is actually a composite, comprised of definitive facts and lofty expectations. Furthermore, we could do a better job at anticipating b.s..
Level-setting
This should be clear, but I’m going to call it out explicitly just in case: I am being critical of the system and process, represented by governments and businesses in general; this is not at all a criticism of India the country, culture, or people. India is fabulous. I seriously could not recommend it enough. You should go!
Your Bubble
On a related meta-note, this post should not be conflated with the anthem to be scared of the world, and not travel. This could be a whole ‘nother post by itself (indeed, it’s in the works, due out soon-ish), but suffice it to say new experiences, good and bad, lead to a rich and rewarding life. Put another way, stepping outside your bubble is fulfilling. Traveling abroad is easily the best way to do this. Everything is new, all the time! I have absolutely no regrets for what I went through, and while I wouldn’t necessarily suggest everyone, say, deliberately throw away their passport and visa next time they’re outside their country, I would argue such an experience, while at first icky, ultimately is a positive.
Between Takes
Maybe you didn’t think this post was a good excuse for xenophobia, but you did think everything I went through was sucky.
Bear in mind that the above “Reality” chapter is an edited version of my personal experience. You read my highlights in fifteen minutes. And recall that this post was focused on the recovering identity part only; I didn’t discuss how I recovered my money or support. In short, part of my story was omitted. Obviously I had my moments – prolonged moments, and I dubbed the overall process “Complete Bullshit” – but there was some good I gotta mention.
First, huuuge shout out to my Offshore colleagues between the takes above and behind the scenes, who went out of their way to support me, and not just as a fellow colleague, or even as a friend, but like I was family. Some of you actually were side by side with me, wading through the bullshit. And to think, it was that bad when I was getting your support. I cannot imagine where I would have been without you. Again, I say, shukria!
Also, I gotta give a shout out to all the random acts of kindness throughout the experience. It was more painful than it should have been, but there was some real good out there, from a taxi driver in Jaipur giving me a free ride to the airport when the police wouldn’t bother with me, to not just friends but simple acquaintances contacting me offering generous help when they suspected from vague social media posts that I was slowly melting down. Even the indirect support, knowing people were just thinking of me, was motivating. Thank you again.
My Passport
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask: If you happen to be reading this, and have located my original passport, I’d be incredibly grateful if you notified me.
‘K?
Okay, thanks.
Oh my God, we made it! And yes, I mean “we.” If you felt like that was long, even for a deep-dive, imagine creating it… part-time, after work, when you’re already zapped of your energy… on top of normal life stuff. It’s taken me months.
Exhausting.
But it was the story that had to be told – the nature of how to really recover your identity abroad. Also, I enjoy doing this! And hopefully you enjoyed it, too. I have big plans for this site, and if you want more of it, I recommend subscribing. You’ll be notified only when there’s a new post, which are released – judging off of this inaugural post – on an irregular schedule. Regardless, thank you for reading, and thank you for your support.