The Full South American Experience

Well, you can't really say you've 'done' South America without having been robbed, can you?

Quito has a reputation for being one of those places you are more likely to be relieved of your possessions by a stranger, and it certainly lived up to this reputation as far as we were concerned.

Flyin´the flag, which as far as I can tell is exactly the same as Colombia´s...
 I´m sure it´s very different

We only had one day in the city, and we spent it wandering around the beautifully preserved Old Town in the sunshine taking photos. We also visited a mirador with a huge statue of La Virgen De Quito at the top and panoramic views of the city. We both agreed it was the prettiest of all the capital cities we had visited so far in SA.

Amen sista

You can´t see it, but my lovely wallet is in my bag

Say what you want about Catholics, they know how to build a good  Cathedral

I can´t remember what this building is, but it´s nice, right?

So we were in good spirits as we donned our backpacks and set off to catch a cab from the main road outside our hostel to the bus station.

As we stood waiting for a taxi I felt something wet hit my head from above. A few days earlier I had been shat on by a bird, so my first reaction was to think it had happened again. Then I looked down and saw the spit on the floor next to my foot. At the precise moment I shouted out in disgust, Tom managed to hail a taxi and the next thing I knew a girl was behind me tried to get into it, or so I thought. Amid all the confusion I heard Tom call out to me to watch my bag, but of course by this time it was  too late and both the girl and my wallet were gone.

All this took place within a few seconds, that's how good they are. Nevertheless I was still angry at myself for allowing it to happen. The spitting scam was known to me, I'd read about it in the Lonely Planet and on the noticeboards of several hostels across the continent. But instead of my immediate reaction being, 'I've just been spat on, I'm about to get robbed!' and grabbing my bag as tightly as I could, it was, 'Urgh, what's that wet thing on my head? Gross, I've been spat on!!' And hand flies to head, at which point, wallet no longer belongs to me.  

Of course it's easy to say what you would and should do when it isn't happening to you. These guys are pros.

We alerted a security guard who called the police, who took us to the station and gave us a crime report very quickly. They were even fairly sympathetic, considering how often this happens in Quito. Although I should point out a lot has been done by the Ecuadorian government to improve safety in Quito in recent years and there is a strong police presence everywhere. But of course bad things still happen, as they do everywhere.

Anyways, all that was left was for me to do was to make four long distance phone calls to the UK to cancel my cards.  One wouldn't let me proceed to an operator until I entered my card number, which I obviously didn't have, seeing as it had been stolen.  One tried to upsell a new product to me. And one kept me on hold for ages with a recorded message in a thick northern accent that said, 'Due t'adverse weather conditions we're operatin wi´low staff numbers t'day, so y'may experience longer waitin times.' And we thought we'd escaped the snow drama.

We set off for our next destination, Baños, much later than planned, but by this time we were just feeling lucky. There had been no violence or threat of violence.  And in my bag, right next to my wallet were my Kindle, camera, mobile phone and both our passports, and we were booked on an international flight less than a week later so it could have been a lot worse than $200. Also, a few weeks earlier in Colombia we'd bought two new padlocks for our luggage and at the time were annoyed to discover, once we got them home, that both sets of keys opened both padlocks, meaning anyone who had the same lock (we bought them in a shop directly opposite the hotel we were about to leave our backpacks at for a few days) could open them. But as it turned out, my set of keys were inside my wallet, so if Tom hadn't have had an identical set, I would have had to rip into my backpack for my stuff and then buy a new one.  Mysterious ways and all that.

To top it off we were about to spend four days in a thermal bath town in the mountains, so we didn't feel sorry for ourselves for too long.

Quito from above, and more importantly quite possibly the last photos taken of my beautiful Converse, before I lost them on a bus journey