A mugging, robbery and a ridiculous police station

Well, it has been an interesting few days.....

I'm in Quito, the capital of Ecuador.  It also happens to be the South American capital of petty crime!  Every time you go out there is a 50% chance someone will try to pickpocket you, and muggings are fairly common, as I found out a few days ago....

I was walking back to my hostel at about 3pm in broad daylight.  I came up some steps and noticed two guys looking at me. They started walking towards me from the next street and as they got closer it was pretty obvious something was going to happen.  They were quite young, maybe 20 or so, and it looked like they might try to swipe something (rather than get violent).  I thought that if I pushed them away as they approached and they'd leave me alone.

Obviously I'm not a particularly big person, but I'm much bigger than you're average Ecuadorian.  I could tell that one of them didn't really have his heart in it, and he stayed a couple of meters away.  However, I was fairly surprised when the other one came up to me and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and tried to put his hand in my pocket.  The only thing he got was the spine of Lonely Planet's South America on a Shoestring in the face, which I happened to have in my right hand at the time.

His mate had already run away and I left him sitting on the floor in a daze before getting up and groggily wandering off.  They didn't get anything but I was quite annoyed by the whole event.  I was even more annoyed by the fact that there was a policeman standing about 30 meters away casually eating an ice cream.  As I walked past him he nodded to me as if to say well done.  I considered introducing him to the Lonely Planet book.  The police are useless here.

I considered myself lucky - most people in the hostel I'm staying at have had something stolen from them while they've been here - but my luck took a dramatic nosedive a couple of days later....

My next destination is Colombia, followed by Panama.  The sights in Colombia form a loop around the country.  For this reason, it is best for me to start travelling from the North as I'll then finish in the North - exactly where I need to be to take a boat to Panama.  I have therefore booked a cheap flight from Popayan to Cartagena leaving on the 4th June.

I left Quito on the morning of the 2nd.  I got on the bus in good time and arrived at the border five hours later.  As I got off the bus I noticed that the zip of my daypack was open which was strange as I'd locked it shut.  On closer inspection, the zip had been cut open.  The person behind me had actually crawled under my seat and sliced it open with a razor blade.  My passport and a backup bank card had been taken.  Fuck.

After coming all that way, there was nothing I could do but get back on a five hour bus to Quito.  After about 13 hours I arrived right back where I'd started and called the bank to find that my account had been emptied.  Spirits were low!  I'd wondered why anyone would bother stealing a passport, but then remembered cash advances.  All you do is go into a bank, swipe your card, sign a bit of paper, pay 5% commission, show some ID and take the money.  I'm sure that no one would believe that some scraggy Ecuadorian in the middle of nowhere could be a British national, but I'd imagine that the bank teller would have been nicely paid off as well.  You can probably tell, as I'm still in Quito, that I have also missed my flight.  Normally, I wouldn't care much if my passport had been stolen but it was typical that it would happen just as I try to cross a border and the one time I book a flight!

Anyway, I am a firm believer that these things make you stronger and there was no point in getting upset about it.  All my friends back at the hostel cooked an awesome dinner to cheer me up and, as we laughed around the dinner table, it didn't seem so bad to be back in Quito.

The next day I had to visit the police station to get a crime report - what a crazy place.  I rocked up and there were 50 people standing outside. I thought it must be closed but went over to have a look. It turned out that all these people were relatives of criminals inside the station. And they were very angry. I squeezed past and managed to get in just as they started throwing stones and bottles at the police - apparently this is normal.  It wasn't much better inside. There were lots of people just milling about. After wandering around for a while and asking a few officers, I was pointed towards a door. I walked through and was surprised to find that I'd walked into an interrogation of a prisoner. The detective didn't seem bothered and pointed me in the proper direction. I came to a locked office which I was told "opens at 1:30pm".  It was 1:45pm - standard.

At 2:15 the officials casually returned from their 1hr 45min lunch break and opened the office.  I was told to wait a minute while three sets of criminals were escorted into the same room.  The were two groups of three people and one of four. They were all handcuffed together in a comedy daisychain style which made it difficult to negotiate corners and to sit down, as the seats in the waiting area were in sets of two.  While I was sat in my booth explaining to the official what had happened, the group of four had to give their details in the next booth.  As each one was talking to the official, the others ended up perching on the back on my chair - this was slightly distracting.  After an excessive amount of time, I emerged with a piece of paper that had been stamped by the officials.  It was the least detailed report ever - one part said "the passport was stolen on a bus from Quito to some other place", but I reckoned it would do the trick.

The next day, today in fact, I got up early and visited the embassy to get an emergency passport.  I really did not have high hopes but the people there were fantastic.  Tomorrow is a holiday (Queen's jubilee) but the girl really went out of her way to make sure I got my passport today.  I was seen straight away and had an emergency passport in my hand by midday!  I will miss my old passport -  it has been all around the world with me on numerous trips - but it only had two pages left for new stamps, so at least it solves the problem of what to do when I run out of pages!  The new one is also a cream yellow - for some reason this makes me smile.

So, I have a passport, my bank is going to refund the money that was taken and I can reschedule my flight for $68.  All in all, I reckon the whole episode has cost me about $250 and three days of time.  This is less than ideal but on the plus-side I had the chance to spend some more time with some great people.  I think I've been quite lucky in the end....