Hi, I will travel into Taiwan in a couple of days and am not sure about some items:
-medicines: I have some prescription meds (2 months supply, about 5 boxes) and couple of gel tubes. Plus a few non-prescription items. None have any opioids or some such in them Plan to stick it all in my checked baggage. Have taken photos of prescriptions for most of these.
-is Viagra a no-no to bring in? I know you can get it easily here, but only big pills (50-100mg)
-I have two 0.5l bottles of alcohol. Read somewhere (IATA) you can only bring one bottle, then Customs site says there’s no limit?
-I bought 2 local sausages for presents here but then read that “unathorised animal products” are not allowed in. Guess they’re not coming in then. My friend here says it’ll be ok if I pack them tight, but I’m not sure I want to risk any hassle.
I can answer the sausage part.
They have a beagle at the airport that is quite adept at sniffing out food products.
They don’t always being him out so you take your chances but if you see it you’re screwed.
Seriously? I never saw that. When my wife came back from a family visit, I told her not to bring anything not packaged, but she forgot brought some dried fish. I told her to declare because she had canned food and we’d been watching Border Security Australia and Canada (and learned about sniffing dogs) on CI (MOD) before she left. She tried to, but they just sent her through. It was late at night, so I guess the beagle was asleep.
Can’t bring meat into Taiwan without a permit. Pharmaceuticals are ok unless it’s like suspicious. No ones going to bother you for personal meds, almost everyone has some with them. They don’t have time to question every single person about some common cold medicines. Also you realize you can just split the pills right?
Alcohol I believe is 1 bottle. At least from customs.
Just for the record:
-didn’t bother with meat. It would be probably be ok if packed tight and sprayed but not worth a risk for somebody like me. Local could afford a fine, I can’t afford the hassle and bad record.
-pills were in the luggage, no problems
-took 2x 0,5litre alcohol in luggage, no problem. It says multiple bottles up to 1l are ok on the Customs page
-pill splitting is not always possible: the coated ones are off, and some unmarked ones (without the splitting grove) are a lottery too I think. The distribution of the active ingredient may be uneven. With Viagra it’s not the end of the world I guess, you can get a bigger headache perhaps, but I wouldn’t recommend it with more serious ones.
