Letter to the Travel Editor
Baggage mishandling
There’s no good time to lose a passport. However, we certainly picked a particularly bad time to lose one of ours. It was early on Saturday when we arrived in Copenhagen after a comfortable Singapore Airlines flight from Auckland and, of course, we were jetlagged. We booked straight into our hotel, then started to wander the city. We should have just rested.
It was late afternoon when we left a museum and in a heavy shower rushed across the road into a small and uncomfortable restaurant. We were wet. My wife took off her handbag which she had bought especially for the trip as it was, among other things, slash proof. She put it down so she could take off her wet jacket. We never saw the bag again and it contained her passport, cellphone, credit card and cash. Actually we just got up and left after a quick meal, totally forgetting the bag.
Arriving back at the hotel we realised her bag wasn’t with us and a call to the restaurant was answered with a negative response — the bag was gone. Off to the police station but it was late on a Saturday and all police stations were closed. First thing on the Sunday and our loss was reported at the central police station but nothing else could be done until the following day when we visited the New Zealand Consulate. The staff at the consulate were very helpful and we managed to get off an application to the New Zealand Passport Office in London, but that office was closed as it was a bank holiday in the UK.
The new passport was clearly not going to arrive in Copenhagen until Thursday and we were booked on a Baltic cruise leaving on the Tuesday. Trusting our luck we turned up at the Regal Princess on the Tuesday afternoon but not surprisingly we were not allowed to board. We then had no choice but to find another hotel for a threenight stay. The passport did arrive on the Friday morning and by catching a bus to Rostok in northern Germany we were able to catch up with the Baltic cruise.
If only we had arrived in Copenhagen on a Monday, we would have been able to get to the consulate on that day or at least on the Tuesday, and we would probably have obtained a passport in time for us to catch the cruise. Our timing was all wrong. Michael Jarman The Travel Editor replies: I’m always paranoid about losing my passport.