Norway, for example, allows only 2L of spirits or 200 cigarettes IIRC. If you're a heavy smoker that's less than a week. I believe Switzerland is similar.
I don't smoke or drink, but I'd imagine that would be fairly easy to get tripped up by if you were travelling around Europe.
When I lived in Japan, I had access to very high end whisky and sake that was not available in the US. When I visited the US, I wanted to share some of this with my friends and family.
One good bottle of sake is 1.75 liters. One good bottle of whiskey is 0.75 liters. It doesn’t take many bottles to surpass the limit, and the items were definitely unique enough to warrant bringing.
If you start talking about things like Christmas presents, it starts getting nuts. All of your friends want you to being them the good stuff that they don’t have allocations for in the US.
Certainly if you're driving around in a camper.
It just happens to be the case that I don't drink or smoke. There are other restrictions like meat, plants, blah blah, the list goes on.
This isn’t necessarily true. Many great whiskeys and spirits aren’t necessarily available to purchase in other countries. Another commenter mentioned the case of Japan. Many great whiskeys and sake produced in Japan aren’t available to buy in other countries.
Apart from that there is a matter of taxes.
"A Vietnamese man carrying four kilograms of pork-filled mooncakes has been turned away from Australia after failing to declare he was carrying food.
African Swine Fever has spread to 50 countries and killed an estimated 25 per cent of the world's pigs
A Vietnamese woman was deported last month for failing to declare 10kg of food in her baggage including pork
Australian migration laws were amended in April to shorten or cancel a visitor visa, for biosecurity contraventions and the importation of objectionable goods."
Some common scenarios I have seen:
* bringing foods that is unavailable over for their friends that live overseas
* bringing home presents of food
* bringing over food that is far cheaper from one country
Because it's a customs faff. That's the point of the thread.
It wouldn't be if there was some nice website laying out all the rules in an easy-to-understand way...
Your logic is "nobody needs a site detailing customs rules because they shouldn't be traveling with the things that I personally already know might conceivably cause a customs faff". The point is the website would solve the problem.
So make it easy to look up and don't let guesses at what some random country in the world might object to dominate all your travel packing and planning (Guesses because until I checked earlier I wouldn't been sure an apple would cause problems anywhere, but apparently at least Australia objects to any fruit). Which was the point of the comment you replied to.
Usually it just seems to be common sense rules that you can bring something like $10k cash or large quantities of alcohol or tobacco, which aren’t practical concerns for almost any traveller.
Have you found rules that may trip people up that we should know about?