Epic Failure in Thailand

It's 5 a.m. I arrive at Don Mueang airport in Bangkok two hours prior to my international flight. The lineups are small. I proceed to the check-in counter and discover my passport is gone. Well this is a video I wish I never had to make. As you heard in the intro, my passport gone. Lost. Stolen. I don't know. It doesn't really matter. Standing at the check-in counter at the airport frantically searching through my bags was pretty evident. I wasn't flying anywhere that day. Worse, I wasn't leaving the country that day because the date on my visa exemption stamp in my passport was that day. If I didn't leave the country before my visa exemption date, I could be subject to several penalties including deportation, a ban from entering the kingdom in the future for one to five years, and a daily fine for every day that I'm overstaying. So what the **** does a guy do now? Stick around. I'll tell you the story. All right. Before you jump all over me and say, always check your passport first, that's the first thing you do. Well, you're right. Rookie error. Epic failure was in the title of this video. Anyways, there's only one person responsible for my passport safekeeping and that's me. So I accept full responsibility for it. And life goes on. And this is what happened. I took the bus from Pattaya to Bangkok. I checked into my hotel. I produced my passport where they took a photo of it. I made photocopies of it. I checked in. I paid. I remember getting my change back. I got the room key. I gathered up my things, hauled up into the hostel room, and immediately put all my stuff into the locker, locked it up, and then I went out for dinner. Came back after a couple hours. I came back to my room, opened up my locker, got my phone charger out of my bag, and it was obvious that nothing had been disturbed in my locker. Nobody had been in there. There was a lot more things more valuable inside my locker than my passport. So I was pretty certain that nothing happened there. I went to sleep and woke up the next morning. It was 4 a.m. so it was quiet. It was dark. I just gathered my bags, hauled out, had a quick shower, and caught a taxi and got to the airport. When I got to the airport, that's when I noticed my passport was not there. I have a specific place where I put my passport all the time and my passport holder. It wasn't there. I searched through my bags, obviously, again, twice, emptied everything out, and just left with a big knot in your stomach. You know that feeling when you know that anxiety is right at the door there. I'm trying to say, stay calm, stay calm, trying to fight off a panic attack at the airport, thinking back, where's the last place I had it? Well, of course, when I checked in. And I remember gathering my change and getting the room key and gathering my bags, but I don't remember putting my passport back in my passport holder. So I had a bit of hope and I felt a little bit better. All I have to do is take another taxi back to the hostel and I'm sure they'll have it at the front counter. Half hour taxi ride later, I arrive at the hostel. I explain, oh, I'm sorry, I must have left my passport here while they searched around and there's no passport. Again, the big knot sinks in my stomach and I'm fighting off the panic attack and trying to stay calm. And I guess there's nothing they can do. I looked around, I checked back into the room, I checked my locker again, I checked around the bed, no passport. And I was pretty certain that at that point, I'd never seen my passport after I handed it over there. So I was pretty sure they had it, but I can't guarantee that. What's left to do now? I guess I go contact the Canadian embassy. All right, well, I google map where the Canadian embassy is and find out where it is. So I jump on a train, go down there. And it's kind of odd. It wasn't an embassy like a fortress, you know, the big iron gates with the RCMP out front guarding it, welcoming in stray Canadians. It was an office building. And as I looked on the on the map at the door that it was on the 14th floor. So as I get to the building, you can't go inside the building without a security card. And of course, over in the corner, there's a little kiosk that said Canadian embassy. So I go over there and there's a lady working there, a non-Canadian lady. And she said, I explained, hey, I need to talk to somebody today because I've lost my passport. My visa expiry date is today. I'm in a world of trouble. I need to talk to somebody. And she says to me, do you have an appointment? No, I just explained I just come from the airport. I got all my luggage here with me. I'm in a world of trouble. I need to talk to somebody today. Well, click the QR code here, she pointed out to me and then you book appointment and then you can talk to somebody. Oh, OK. So I go ahead online, try to make an appointment. And I realized that there's no appointments available till a week and a half later. So I go back to the nice lady at the at the kiosk and I explain, no, I need to speak to somebody today. I'm in an overstay situation here. I need to I need to talk to somebody. And then she hands me a card for an emergency contact number, a telephone number. I said, OK, well, at least I can speak to somebody on a phone if I can't talk to nobody, you know, at the embassy today. So at that point, I call the line and I talk to somebody who's a receptionist who advises me that somebody will call me back and she takes my contact information. I explain that, you know, I lost my passport. OK, well, the passport officer will call you back. But in the meantime, she says, have you filled out a police report or filed a police report? I said, no, I have no idea what to do. That's why I wanted to talk to somebody. So she said, well, need to do that before you can do anything or apply for a new passport. So go do that right away. So that was the first bit of advice that I got there. So alarmingly, the Canadian embassy is not an open door policy for Canadians. You're not allowed to go into the embassy in Bangkok without an appointment. Keep that in mind. So I go to the nearest police station. I file a police report and they advise me that was a good thing because if there was any fraudulent activity with regards to my passport, whether somebody used it as collateral for, you know, buying a motor or renting a motorbike, that at least I would be safe because I'd filed the lost passport application anyways. So after the police report is filed, now, what do I do? Where do I go? I'm waiting for the Canadian embassy to call me back. The lady promised me somebody would call me back. So I don't got nowhere to go. I'm supposed to be in Cambodia. I got a hotel booked in Cambodia that night. Meanwhile, I've just realized I better cancel that because I'm not going to make that booking. And fortunately, I was able to cancel that. But I had nowhere to go. I didn't know what to do. So my batteries were going to die on my phone soon. So I went back to the hostel. Hopefully, maybe my passport might show up. I thought I'd hang out there for a while and I ended up booking another night. I just said, what the heck? And I crawled into the cubicle in the hostel. I plugged my phone in and I sat there. It was probably about one, two in the afternoon. And I just stayed there waiting for the Canadian embassy to call me back and ended up just falling asleep until the next morning. And I woke up an illegal alien. Nothing for me to do now. I guess I've tried my best. So I just packed up my bags and I caught a bus back to Pattaya. So when I got back here, I decided, well, I better go to the immigration office and report the whole situation because the immigration police and the Thai police, they're two different entities and the immigration police are the ones that I need to be worried about with this overstay situation. So once I got home, I went back to the immigration office here in Chonburi province in Pattaya and waited in line for two hours to get a form. And the form was the lost passport form. And I said, well, now what do I do? I filled out the form and they said, you got to come back when you got a new passport. So I said, okay, well, I'll come back when I got a new passport, but what about me being in an overstay situation? And they said, yes, well, we realized that, but there's nothing we can do. Do you have a police report? I said, yes, I do. And they said, oh, okay, well, I said, I'm just worried about being fined for this period of time. And they said, well, all we can tell you is to bring this police report back and bring this lost passport form back when you have your passport and we'll let you know then. So meanwhile, I spent two days now, I still haven't heard back from the Canadian embassy. So I give them another call. Canadian embassy, a nice kind lady on the phone on the emergency line there. I've called to her three times. She knows me by name and she reconfirms my telephone number and my email address. And she knows I'm in dire need. So she goes out of her way and she gives me the information to reapply for a new passport. And she sends me all the documentation that I'm going to need, including the declaration that I have lost my passport. And I have to bring all that with passport photos and prepay in advance and make an appointment to the Canadian embassy to apply for a new passport, which will take approximately four to five weeks. So, so for the time being, that's where I'm at. I'm stuck here in Thailand. I can't leave the country. Yeah, they're worse places to be, stranded, I can imagine. But the bad part is, is that I can't really go anywhere. I can't book a train ticket or I can't book a hotel or rent a motorbike or even book a ticket on a large ferry. So that's kind of the difficult situation. Hopefully, if I get confronted by some police here, that the police report for my missing passport will suffice as evidence that I'm not an overstaying on purpose. Anyways, so that's where I'm at. And for some reason, the universe didn't want me to go to Cambodia. They, the forces want me to stay here in Thailand. And with all that being said, all I can do is go with the flow.