“A masterclass in traveler stupidity”
I arrive in Antigua-Guatemala with that typical backpacker optimism – you know, the kind that makes you think Central America is just one big adventure waiting to happen. I find a suitable hotel, nothing fancy, just a place to crash for a few days while I soak up the colonial charm and pretend I’m discovering something profound about myself.
The room isn’t ready yet. The owner, a middle-aged guy who’s probably seen a thousand gringo tourists come and go, tells me I can move in within an hour. But I don’t want to wait around like some eager tourist checking his watch. So I tell the cleaning lady – a small woman who barely looks up from her mop – that I’d leave my bag in the room, and when she finishes, she can hand the key to the owner.
“No worries,” I say in my confident traveler Spanish. “I’m going for a stroll through town.”
Famous last words.
When I come back an hour later, the door is still wide open. Red flag number one, but I’m an idiot, so I walk right in. I look around – nobody there, just the lingering smell of cleaning products and my own stupidity. My bag? Gone. Vanished like my common sense apparently had an hour earlier.
Only my second bag is still there, the one filled with artesanía I’d bought along the way – those colorful Guatemalan crafts that every tourist hauls around like proof they’ve “experienced the culture.” Its contents are scattered across the floor like confetti at a very depressing party.
The leather jacket I’d left draped over a chair – the one with my passport and $1,600 in traveler’s checks tucked safely in the inside pocket – gone too. But here’s the weird part: they left my passport on the table. Just sitting there like a calling card. The checks? Obviously all gone, every last one of them.
That was quite a shock, the kind that hits you like a cold slap of reality. One minute you’re a carefree traveler, the next you’re standing in an empty room wondering how you became such an easy mark.
Damage Control
Luckily – and this is the only lucky thing about this entire clusterfuck – I’d taken a hundred-dollar check out of the stack before I went for my stroll. Some paranoid instinct, maybe, or just dumb luck. Since I still have my passport, I’m able to change the check without too much hassle. With this money, I have just enough to get myself to Guatemala City, assuming I eat nothing but street food and hitchhike half the way.
So now I’m sitting here in this suddenly very quiet hotel room, left with only the clothes I’m wearing and a bag full of Guatemalan crafts that the thieves apparently found as worthless as I suddenly do. The hotel owner – suddenly very concerned about my welfare – talks me out of calling the police.
“That would mean a lot of problems for me,” he says, wringing his hands like Lady Macbeth.
Well, I think, it doesn’t make much difference to me because with or without police, my bag and checks aren’t going to magically reappear. The damage is done, and filing a report feels like closing the barn door after the horses have not just escaped, but probably made it to the next county.
I regret that decision later, of course. At the embassy, they ask for a police report. Amex wants one too. Apparently, getting robbed isn’t enough – you also need paperwork to prove it happened.
Embassy Blues
Later, in Guatemala City, the Swiss Embassy proves to be about as helpful as a chocolate teapot. Actually, they make everything more difficult, which I didn’t think was possible given my current situation.
“No, we don’t give any money before we receive a telex confirmation with bank details from a guarantor in Switzerland,” the embassy official tells me, speaking like he’s reciting from a manual titled “How to Make Desperate Citizens Feel Even More Desperate.”
So I send a telex to my mother – remember telexes? This was back when international communication moved at the speed of bureaucracy. Two days later, they have their precious confirmation. I ask for $1,000, figuring that’s reasonable given that I’m stranded in Central America with nothing but the clothes on my back and a suddenly useless collection of worry dolls.
But this asshole behind the desk – and he really is an asshole, the kind who probably got into embassy work because he enjoys wielding tiny amounts of power over people in crisis – asks me why I need so much money and gives me only $400.
As if it’s his own money. As if I’m asking for champagne and caviar instead of just enough cash to get home without sleeping in bus stations.
Stupid prick.
Anyway, it’s enough to get me back to Mexico, assuming I travel like a monk who’s taken a vow of poverty.
The Kindness of Strangers
A Swiss couple I meet in Guatemala City – the kind of travelers who actually know what they’re doing, unlike me – lends me some money so I can buy a flight from Mérida on the Yucatan Peninsula to Puerto Rico, where I’m supposed to meet up with my girlfriend. They probably see the desperation in my eyes, or maybe they just recognize a fellow Swiss citizen making poor life choices abroad.
But getting my money back from Amex? That takes two months. Two months of always calling Houston, always talking to the same guy who always asks me the same questions, like we’re stuck in some Kafkaesque customer service loop.
“We have to wait to see if the checks would be cashed,” he tells me, week after week, as if the thieves are going to take their sweet time before heading to the bank.
One day, this charming representative tells me he doesn’t believe a word I say. He thinks I sold the checks myself and want to cash in a second time. Because apparently, getting robbed in Guatemala and then spending two months trying to get reimbursed is some elaborate scam I’ve cooked up for fun.
Legal Pressure
In Puerto Rico, my girlfriend has a friend who knows a lawyer – one of those small miracles that happen when you’re at the end of your rope. I have him call this guy from Amex in Houston, figuring maybe a lawyer’s voice will carry more weight than my increasingly desperate pleas.
But no: “I can give no information to anyone but you,” he tells the lawyer.
However – and this is where the story gets interesting – a week later, I get my money back. All of it, ready to pick up at an Amex office, naturally in the form of more Amex checks, because apparently they think I haven’t learned my lesson about carrying their paper around foreign countries.
I cash them all immediately. Every single one, right there at the counter.
Never again, Amex. Never again.
Lessons Learned
The lesson here is painfully obvious: never leave any valuables in a hotel room, especially with the door wide open like some kind of invitation to every opportunistic thief in the neighborhood.
Stupid me.
But there’s a deeper lesson too, one about trust and assumptions and the way we move through the world thinking our good intentions will somehow protect us. They won’t. The world doesn’t care about your travel plans or your faith in human nature. Sometimes people will steal your stuff, embassy officials will treat you like a criminal, and customer service representatives will question your honesty while you’re just trying to get your life back together.
The only thing you can control is how prepared you are for when it all goes sideways.
And maybe, just maybe, don’t leave your door wide open in a foreign country. That might help too.
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