(Not trip-related)
Stupid travellers
Besides plain robbery, there is a variety of scams being practitioned by con-men all over the world.
One popular trick is that one bandit, usually a kid, sprays paint, toothpaste or something similar on your back or shoulder without you even noticing it.
Then somebody else comes along and points out the mishap. He’s eager to help you in cleaning up the mess, but as soon as you take down your backpack, daypack or whatever you carry, all of a sudden at least six or eight people are around you, and your backpack is gone before you even notice it.
Those people come in all ages and sizes – in Lima, Peru, I even had an old grandma trying to trick me into taking down my backpack by doing the toothpaste trick on me.
However, some of the best conmen operate in Bogota, Colombia. Bogota ranks among the most dangerous cities of the world, with foreigners being held at gunpoint in broad daylight right in the city center, or entire buses being stopped by armed bandits in more desolate areas.
Those holdups generally end in all passengers being left just in their underwear and the bandits driving off with the bus, the baggage and even the clothes the passengers were wearing.
But besides pure violence some elaborate scams were invented in Bogota. One example is the “drug deal” scam, which was tried on me while I was in Bogota:
I was taking some pictures on the Plaza de Armas, the main city square, certainly outing me as a tourist. A middle aged lady approached me and started the usual conversation (translated into English):
“Where are you from? What are you doing here?”
It turned out that she was from Peru, making holidays in Colombia. We talked for a while when suddenly a well dressed man came towards us. He introduced himself as a police officer, a member of an anti-drug unit. The ID card he showed us said something about “Drug enforcement agency of Colombia”, but of course I didn’t recognize the batch.
“So what’s the matter?”, I asked him.
“I suspect that you are participating in a drug deal”, he responded. “It appears to me that you have been negotiating with this lady about buying drugs.”
I was shocked! Certainly I did not want to become involved with the drug trade, for which Colombia is so famous. I had heard about the prisons on Bogota where foreigners are held, without any food or water, making them entirely dependent on outside help, e.g. from missionaries. Jail sentences are stiff in Colombia, and I definitely didn’t want to spend the next twenty years of my life in a Colombian carcel, somehow trying to survive.
If the Peruvian lady really was a drug trafficker, I was in trouble.
“But I just met this lady!”, I protested. “I have no idea who she is!”
“You know”, he said, “here in Colombia we have many foreigners who just come here to buy drugs, either for themselves or to sell them at home.
This must not be. I am a member of a special anti-drug unit, and I am empowered with special rights.
Tell me, do you have cash money, especially US Dollars on you?”
I answered that I had only some cash Dollars. That wasn’t exactly true, as I always carry all my traveller cheques and cash on me so not to leave it in an unsecure spot. But I was careful enough not to admit that.
He asked the same question to the Peruvian lady, who also had some cash money in form of US Dollars on her.
“So I have to write down the numbers of the bills and your passport number”, he said, “because, when the money later turns up in a drug deal, we know that you have been involved”.
This sounded more or less reasonable to me. If they tracked down the foreigners who used their Dollars to buy drugs, they could catch them. I was not astonished about the fact that he wanted to see the Peruvian lady’s bills although he thought I was the buyer.
The lady started to get out her Dollar bills and counted them openly in the center of Bogota, the city with one of the highest crime rates in the world. She then handed the money over to the policeman, who took it and said: “I’ll go over to the police station over there at the corner and have the numbers typed down. You wait here!”
Then he vanished.
At that point I thought that this was a scam. How could the lady hand all her money to him, in total several hundred Dollars? I began to feel sorry to her, but she didn’t have any concerns.
And really, about ten minutes later the guy reappeared and handed back the money. “Now you”, he demanded, “how much money do you have on you?”
There was some distrust left in me. “Let’s go to the police station”, I suggested, “I cannot get out my money because it’s inside my pants!”
Somehow he believed me and agreed. The three of us started to walk, with the guy in front.
We walked for about ten minutes when I became suspicious. How could he have been gone for only some minutes with the lady’s money, but now it took us so much longer? The roads we were walking didn’t increase my confidence, as they became smaller and darker. Night was about to fall, and I felt increasingly unsafe.
I walked up to the guy and started talking to him, carefully voicing my suspicions. “You know”, I said, “I think I have just seen a policeman. Maybe he can protect us on our way to the station.” He didn’t answer.
“I think I’ll call him”, I said and turned.
Suddenly the guy became were agitated. “You know, I think you are a good man, You can go now! I just take the lady to the police station and interrogate her.”
He didn’t have to say that twice. Off I was, heading back to the Plaza de Armas, lucky to have escaped from whatever had awaited me.
However, after some minutes I began to realize the whole thing had been a scam, arranged by this one guy. Still I believed the lady to be a victim as well, and I imagined her to be robbed in a narrow, dark alley. So I asked my way to the next police station and recounted the story to a policeman.
“You were lucky”, he said. “They are working together. We have many people falling for this trick!”
Today I know that I had narrowly escaped a major mishap, which might have ended with me being lured to a desolate area and robbed of all my belongings, if not more.
But still I give regards to the Colombian conmen, who come up with such elaborate schemes, instead of resolving to pure violence.
Stupid thieves
Some thieves are plain stupid, though. I met a British guy in Guatemala who wanted to climb a volcano and had hired a local guide for that. The trip took two days, and the British guy took lots of photos on the way, going through several rolls of film. Photos of the scenery, of his guide, of himself.
When they had reached the summit, the local guide somehow turned evil and robbed the British guy, taking his money, his camera etc. He didn’t take everything, though – especially not the rolls of film with pictures of himself!
Once the Brit had made it back down the mountain, he had his films developed and took them straight to the police station, where they didn’t take long to capture the guy!
Lucky travellers
Some of us are lucky, though. I met two Danish guys in Lima, Peru, who were staying in a downtown hotel. Well, “hole” would have been a more appropriate word.
Apparently, the entire hotel got raided one night by armed thieves. The thieves came into the hotel in the early morning hours, rounded the guests up in the living room and took all the valuables.
But they didn’t rob everybody. The two Danish guys had been in a room which apparently was not discernible as a hotel room – it looked more like a storeroom. They had locked it from the inside and didn’t answers the knocks on the door (by the thieves) due to some excessive drinking the evening before. So they just slept through the robbery.
When they came down to the living-room the next morning and innocently asked the reason for the general confusion, the other people got a little bit angry!
Angry travellers
Most travellers get angry when they are robbed, but some just freak out.
I saw two British backpackers loosing their mind on the bridge between Paraguay and Brazil, the so called ‘Friendship Bridge’ in the vicinity of Iguazu Falls. This bridge is no-man’s land, because the river forms the border and the border posts are on either side of the bridge. (It was actually called ‘Stroessner Bridge’ after the former Paraguayan dictator, until a few years ago somebody realized that a dictator’s name doesn’t really promote tourism).
The two backpackers were just leaving Brazil and walked over the bridge, when a young boy ran past them and snatched the daypack off the hands of one of them. However, that was not a wise idea. The backpacker dropped his pack immediately and ran after the boy, while his friend guarded the pack.
He caught up quickly. The boy dropped the daypack when he realized he was too slow, but the backpacker didn’t stop the pursuit. Instead, he caught up with the boy, grabbed him and threw him over the railing of the bridge without fussing around!
The boy was lucky, because the water was deep. He fell some ten or twenty meters, but didn’t hurt himself seriously. The backpacker turned around without even watching the impact.
Border officials from both sides clapped applause.
Hawkers
People trying to sell you more or less useful things are one of the great delights and the great nuisances of travel. Hawkers can become a real headache when they don’t accept a “no” (like in Western Africa), but most of the times it’s fun, even if you don’t want to buy anything.
Being approached on an oriental bazaar by a hawker selling a “Carpet?”, my favourite answer is “I’m not buying today.” However, you can really surprise them by asking “Yes, how many do you buy?”.
Similarly, the obvious answer to “Hashish?” is “I don’t sell.”