Waiting for the hotel to give me my shipping options. They’ve been remarkably kind and generous in helping me so far.
Flights at the moment aren’t particularly cheap but I’ve definitely been looking as I certainly wouldn’t mind going back for another day or two. Cheapest options are around $300 USD and not great flights.
I’m kinda thinking this way also. It’s a sad choice to have to make lol
Macbook Air
Presuming no cursive, no dashes through sevens, etc? There is only one way to write letters and numbers in English for Taiwanese.
Nice, maybe share the hotel name once you’re all done, sounds like a good one to stay at!
Not easily removal so, unless it’s a very old one! Sounds like the hotel are doing you a solid on checking shipping options though, let’s hope they find a solution or, better yet, someone is travelling over and willing to hand carry for you.
How did this work out in the end?
Ah I forgot to come back.
I posted my predicament in the Subtle Asian Travel group offering a 3000NT reward if someone brings it from Hanoi to Taipei. A couple folks reached out with some possibilities, but I’d guess maybe 36 hours after I posted, a gentleman from the US told me he was making that trip on that Sunday.
Long story short: we met up at Taipei 101, exchanged cash for laptop, and I had my MacBook in my hands just one week after I’d lost it. It still had half its battery charge left! I asked the GM of the hotel if I could pay them a little or send money online somehow, and he said please just leave them a review. Great service from honest staff. I got super lucky
Nice, although the guy could have done it for a beer…Glad you got it back so quickly. If it doesn’t impact your privacy, name the hotel here and it might help with some business.
My review on google:
The old “are you carrying anything you didn’t pack?” question came to mind when I read this. It’s good you’re an honourable person, and it’s great you found a trusting person to help you get that computer back, but I could also imagine some other scenerios in which things perhaps would not work out quite so well . . .
Guy
Wow, worth mentioning the hotel attempted to deliver it to him at the airport. That is amazing.
I don’t know, the hotel offered to pack it up and send it back, but that didn’t suit evidently. And as @afterspivak touches on, this sort of thing is really a big ask in these times.
It’s probably not a great idea to make generalizations, and I’m having a nice cold beer at the moment so heading towards a hazy “you’re my best mate, you are” state of mind, but: my (relatively limited) experience of Vietnamese people these days is that they are a classy bunch. They just get shit done, and often just wave away fairly major favours with “oh, it’s nothing”.
Vietnam is going places, IMHO.
The first thing I did was post my predicament on the Taiwan Travel Facebook group. It’s a massive English speaking forum with loads of travelers coming to Taiwan who are active on there. Within an hour I had a message from a European lady who was flying HAN-TPE the very next day. Before I had a chance to reply, she had changed her mind with concerns about not knowing me or my package. I attempted to allay her fears by sharing with her ALL of my communications with the hotel…hoping that such transparency would reveal the situation to be genuine. (I’m talking about my initial social media correspondence with the hotel, including lots of photos, as we attempted to connect in the airport, my subsequent emails with the hotel general manager, and my reservation info to show I really did stay there) But she could no longer be swayed, and to be fair, I get that I could have faked all those things. My post on the Taiwan Travel group was removed by the administrators within another hour or so due to it not being about Taiwan travel planning.
For my Subtle Asian Travel post, I led with a few photos of my communications with the hotel to set people in the right mindset from the start. Sure if you think about it more the danger still remained, but at least it would feel more genuine.
Yeah, I kinda thought all along that it was impossible and didn’t make sense to try. But the hotel staffer was very eager to salvage my day and insisted on doing so. I was kinda panicking that they would bring it to the airport and give it to someone to give to me and it would get lost in transit. So I didn’t really want them to try and I was quite relieved when in the end they said they had it back at the hotel and the hotel manager was going to keep it safe for me.
P.S. I was already through immigration when I realized I didn’t have my laptop and the agents wouldn’t allow me to go back out (I had a multi-entry visa so in theory I could go back if they let me) and I kept getting passed off to multiple other officers (none who could speak English) and I had a moment where I almost got in deep doo doo…nobody was mean to me and I wasn’t causing any scene per se, but I was probably annoying since I kept pleading if there was anyone who could let me just go back outside for a minute. Anyway, at one point an officer sent me to another officer who was going to take me back outside, but then one of them grabbed my passport just before I stepped back to the landside. Woah…I said I can’t go outside without my passport cause then I won’t be able to leave.
Lots of random gestures, shoulder shrugs, pretending to inspect the pages in my passport, passing it from one person to another, and then they let me take it back. And I immediately gave up on trying to get back outside. It was a wake up call that things could go south very quickly if I’m not careful.
The airports in Vietnam, based on my cursory reading, do not have a great repution for administrative awesomeness.
Good for you for figuring things out, despite the chaos, and getting this resolved.
Guy