Sarah: Mancora, Peru - Breasts, bugs and banditos
Trip Start
Dec 27, 2007
1
58
80
Trip End
Dec 28, 2008
Mancora,
Peru
Saturday, May 31, 2008
On our second night, the town was invaded by locusts - in swarms I mean. They kept crawling under our door so Ray did the manly thing and got rid of the 12 or so crawling round our room - purely catch and release though. I´m not scared of many things: I can do heights, depths, speeds, small spaces, rats, mice, PUBLIC SPEAKING... but I really don´t like insects. We tried blocking the door with a pair of my trousers but they just found their way in and got into my trousers (the ones on the floor!). So then we had to shove toilet paper in the gap to block it. Later on we heard someone outside the room, maybe the owner, stomping and stomping all over the place, and the next morning the hallway was a locust graveyard. When we opened the door that morning, there were two of the little bastards just waiting to come in - I told Ray to stomp on them but he proceed to try to flick them out with his toe and instead flicked them up onto me! Honestly, sometimes that man is too sensitive for my own good! The whole town was in major clean up mode - thousands of locusts were being swept up in every shop, cafe, bank etc on the strip.
Yesterday we hopped on a bus at 1pm for the long, 15 hour journey to Quito, in Ecuador - our last stop in South America. Even though we were only an hour from the border, we didn´t get moving on the Ecuadorian side until about 6 o´clock. During the trip we were stopped by police, ordered to disembark the bus and searched - the men physically. These searches occurred at 8pm, 1:30am and 4am. Yes a really good night´s sleep. After one of the searches (the 1:30am one), 15 mins down the road, Ray noticed that the padlock on the laptop bag was rattling. When he went to move the bag, he realised the laptop was gone. We immediately went to the driver and he kindly turned the bus around and drove back to the checkpoint. The locals on the bus were saying - bad luck, the police will have stolen it and you won´t get it back. They have a lot of faith in their law enforcement, the Ecuadorians.
Well we told the police what had happened, so they immediately and judiciously searched all the passengers, whom we weren´t worried about because they had all been OFF the bus when it went missing. A couple of the more assertive customers argued with the police, but to no avail - well what were they going to say: "oh, you´re right, we stole it, here it is, our apologies." I had used it on the bus and locked it up with a combination padlock and stowed it at the back of the luggage shelf above us. It was only disturbed during the search, not before. The tags had been cut to render the padlock useless and then the zip ripped open to take the power cord as well. One of the policemen told me I had to inform the police when I got to the terminal and I said to him, "how are they going to help me? It´s not there, it´s here." Fat chance we had of ever seeing it again. Eventually after about half an hour of getting nowhere, the driver said we had to go as the passengers, understandably, were getting hacked off - we´d cost them an hour´s travel, they had all been searched, again, and had had to wait around outside while we argued futilely with the police. We apologised to them when we reboarded the bus but many were sympathetic to us.
We couldn´t really sleep after that, we felt so ripped off, almost violated, you know? If it had been a street theif or an opportunistic bum then it wouldn´t have been so bad, but to be robbed by the people who are supposed to UPHOLD the law, WHILST at their mercy and under their oders is very upsetting. Thankfully, we backed up all the photos up to Machu Picchu onto Ray´s external hard drive, and the others since, even though I transferred them to the laptop, I didn´t delete them from my camera like I usually do. So we lost NO photos, which is a huge relief. The laptop should be covered by insurance, we´ve contacted them already. We´re not having much luck filing a police report however: we´ve been to three police stations today and none of them have the friggin form - a simple "theft report" form. Seriously! And my cursing was far far worse than that! - Ray had to calm me down.
Well, needless to say, the whole incident has left us feeling rather bitter. Ironically, it was our LAST bus ride (which I needed to repeat to myself several times during the journey) and Quito is our LAST destination. On the upside, Ray can now get a laptop with more internal memory because Windows Vista wasn´t working properly with only 1GB.
Well, that´s my moan - from idyllic Mancora to the nightmare of night searches. Mmm, our introduction to Ecuador has been interesting!
