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Claire & Dave's Big Adventure
- Roadtrip 4. The robbery.
After our trip to Peninsular Valdes we were on a bit of a high. Our road trip had been great so far aside from some of the really long boring drives. We were leaving Patagonia and we had seen everything we had wanted to see and more. We just had a few more stops to make in the Lake District that we had puposefully left out on our way down for our journey back up North. Plus it was nearly Christmas! Our budget was looking healthy as for once everything had cost slightly less than planned and now we were heading to the town of Puerto Madryn to visit our friend Phil who we had met originally in Paraguay. Life was good.
Phil was working at a small hostel run by a friendly French man who kindly allowed us to park/camp our van outside on the road whilst still allowing us to use the hostel's facilities. When we arrived we decided to leave our bag of valuables in Phil's room, we thought this would be safer than leaving them in the van on the road outside overnight.<--- The second worst decision we have ever made.
On our first night there we also met another English couple, Will and Louise (who get the honour of being named because they heavily feature later in the stories of our travels). It was good fun on that first night we arrived, we played an amazing game called 'Frogs' in the garden that basically requires throwing gold coins (not real gold) into frogs mouths (not real frogs) followed by a lovely barbeque with several bottles of wine and beer.
We also met an interesting Welsh lady in her sixties who had just returned from the Falkland Islands. She had been travelling pretty much all of her life and was attempting to visit every country in the world, she was on about number 150 when we met her. She had fascinating stories about all her adventures, but oddly most countries she had visited she seemed to dislike and every story ended with the phrase "and the food was terrible". She never left anywhere without her flask of tea or her sandwiches wrapped in foil.
We only planned on the one night at the hostel but as we had such a good time the first night we decided to stay for just one more before leaving for the lakes. <--- The worst decision we have ever made.
After a day exploring some of the coffee shops and bars we had another fun night with the guys we had met at the hostel. We all sat down for dinner and had a lovely fish pie made by Phil, who is quite the chef. This was again followed by many beers and bottles of wine. At several points during the night Claire suggested to get the camera to take some pictures of such a lovely evening . The camera was in the bag which was in Phil's room, which incidentally was in view throughout the entire evening, to take some pics but for one reason or another she kept getting distracted.
At about 10.30pm we, Will, Louise, Phil and a few others were sat in the garden poishing off a few more beers. Phil's roommate returned from the town and asked if anybody had seen her phone and bag which she had left on her bed. When nobody had seen them she started panicking that somebody had been in the room. That was when it dawned on us that our bag was also in the room. We all raced to the room and our nightmares were realised.
We had been robbed! Along with Phil's laptop and wallet, his roommates bag and phone somebody had stolen our bag. Not just any bag, but our really really really important bag containing all of our valuables. We immediatley filled with dread. This was our worst nightmare. Inside the bag were our passports, about £300 cash, our credit cards, our driving licenses, our Ipad, our other LG tablet, our new camera, our video camera, Claire's new kindle, the sd card containing all of our photos from the entire roadtrip, our notepad and a pack of sticking of plasters.
To be honest we panicked, we didn't know what to do first. All the lads went on the street to look round to see if they could see anyone or find the bags but to no avail. The police were called and arrived promptly but were about as much use as you'd expect in a dodgy corrupt South American country. At about 2am, after filling out endless forms with the police and speaking to various unhelpful people on the phone we began to realise that there was pretty much no chance of ever finding any of our stuff.
We had a sleepless night in the campervan before getting up early and trying to figure out a plan and get sorted. We spoke to all our banks to cancel the cards. We argued with the insurance company who said we weren't covered for a lot of the items because they were not in a safety deposit box.
We spoke to the embassy to see what we needed to do regarding our passports. We were told we had two options.
1- Visit the embassy in Buenos Airies (1500 km away) to get a temporary passport at £200 each, but the temporary passport would only allow us to travel to 5 countries including England, but we had planned on visiting 7 more in total and our route home was via USA who don't accept the temporary passports.
2 - Visit the embassy in Buenos Airies (still 1500km away) to get a new passport at £200 each which would take 6 weeks and we would have to remain in corrupt crime riddled Argentina.
Neither option was great and both would seriously effect our plans. To further complicate matters we had to think about the van. We didnt have enough kms left (or time) in our hire agreement to take the van to Buenos Airies and then back to Chile. Neither did we relish our chances of driving our van in the city of Buenos Airies, which is nortorious for having terrible traffic and terrible drivers. And after speaking to Wicked we were told we wouldnt be able to transport the car over the border with temporary passports that didn't match up with the car hire documents.
It was a complete nightmare! At this point the idea of simply dumping the van in a river was seriously contemplated. Fortunately, Wicked, the hire company that we were originally worried about for their customer service, came back to us and were actually very helpful. They said they would be able to send a driver on a bus to meet us in Mendoza on the Argentinian/Chilean border and they would take care of the van for us, but at what cost we didnt know.
The police weren't a lot of help as you'd expect. In the morning we went to collect the crime report from the station and it was littered with mistakes and inaccuracies. It took 3 attempts to simply get our names and passport details correct.
It took us all day to sort all this logistical ******** out using very ****** wifi and only our iPhones. We spent another night at the hostel, where the kind owner let us stay in the dorm for free.
Everything was getting us down. It's hard to describe the feeling we had, we were so angry at whoever it was that did it. The thought that somewhere out there some ******* was looking at all our things, no doubt deleting all our photos and probably laughing whilst they did it too. Those utter *******s!
That feeling of anger along with tbe frustration of not really knowing what to do next in regards to our passports, van, plans and newly depleted finances made us even do the unthinkable. We started looking into flights home. We just couldnt be bothered with it all. Maybe it was time to go home, sort everything out from there and perhaps have a small holiday in the New Year when we got our passports back - that was genuine plan for a short while.
But then we realised that would mean those *******s would win. Well no way, no scummy Argentinian smackhead thief is going to cancel our trip, our honeymoon!
The next morning we had a plan. We would buy some guns, tear round the city from crack den to ***** house shouting and threatening every lowlife scumbag we met until eventually somebody ratted out the piece of **** with the new blue Vango rucksack. We would then take the ******* out to the desert and with a pair of pliers we would go medievil on his ass.
Only joking.
Instead, we arranged with Wicked to meet in Mendoza and give them the car which they would then drive through the border for us (at what cost though we did not know) and we planned to apply for new passports in Buenos Airies on the way (well kind of on the way, just a 2000km detour). We were prepared to wait it out for 6 weeks in Argentina, deciding that we could hang out in BA for a week and maybe do some volunteering or something productive with our extended stay. Plus, we would be able to eat a lot of steaks in 6 weeks!
So we said our goodbyes to Phil and hit the road for Buenos Aires. This was going to be a long drive. As you can imagine the mood in the car was a sombre one. Its bad enough doing these long solitary drives when you want to, never mind when you have no option.
We had drove for about 6 hours and covered about 700kms when we got a phone call from the hostel. They had found our passports! At last! Some good(ish) news.
They had been found on the beach by a dog walker. It turns out that the thieves hadnt wanted our passports so simply dumped them. Either that or the dodgy police had actually found everything but decided to keep everything else for themselves. Either way we would never be seeing the rest of the stuff again but at least now we were able to leave the country and get the van back to Chile without all the extra costs. Unfortunatley due to the delay, the extra 1400 kms we had put on the clock and the new depletion of funds our trip to the lakes was definitley cancelled but that was the least of our worries now.
For the first time since the robbery we were actually smiling. We spun the van round and set off back to the hostel to get our beloved passports back. What a relief!
As soon as we turned the van around, BANG! A lorry drove past us, kicked up a stone and put a huge bullseye in the middle of our non insured windscreen. Brilliant.
We drove the rest of the way in silence.
1 - Don't purchase the cheapest travel insurance available. It's pointless.
2 - An onion simply wrapped in foil and put into the hot coals of a barbeque is a lovely addition to any meal.
3 - Always back up your photos online. Every day. Without fail.
Transport Stats
Planes used - 11
Buses/coaches used - 82
Trains used - 25
Metros/subways used - 41
Cars used - 11
Minivans - 10
Russian Campervans used -1
Horses used - 1
Camels used - 1
Taxis used - 20
Cable cars used - 1
Bicycles used- 3
Tuk tuks/autorickshaw used - 31
Scooters used - 6
Elephants used - 0
Ferrys used - 5
CycleRickshaw - 1
Bamboo HouseBoat - 1
Tour Boat - 2 (+1)
Combi Van - 2
Huge 4x4 Truck Thingys- 2
Catamarans - 1
Kms travelled in campervan - 10395
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