The robbery

14Sep10

Shortly after Adam’s brother, Chris, arrived in Santiago, we took him to the coast to show him some of our favorite views of our trip here in Chile.  After a night out in Valpo, a drive up the beach took a terrible wrong turn and ended up in some pretty disastrous problems for us.  Here’s the story.

Sunday after the party in Valpo at “El Huevo” we decided to take a short drive up the coast to show Chris a little bit of the Pacific side we’ve explored.  We got some empanadas and other food at one of our favorite sea-side places and continued our drive.  Shortly up the road near Concon beach there was several large rocks that were formed as a kind of lookout to explore the water.  Let’s go take a look!  We parked and wanted to take a look.  So I put my personal belongings (including my purse and most of our valuables) inside the trunk thinking that would be better than leaving it in the back seat.  We took a few minutes playing on the rocks and the boys decided to go out further.  I thought this was a pretty stellar photo opp, so I headed back to the car to grab the camera.  What I didn’t know is that the car hadn’t been locked, which in many places (at least in the states) as long as there were no valuables able to be seen, shouldn’t have been a big deal.  I opened the door to pop the drunk.  I took one big peak and realized that a few things were missing…a few BIG things!!!  Chris’ suitcase with ALL of his belongings as well as my purse were no longer in the trunk.  At first glance, I wondered if someone  had put them back into the car and I didn’t notice.  Or if someone around us was pulling some practical joke.  So I tried to stay calm as I was frantically looking in an around all of the cars in that area trying to spot our stuff.  From the quick glance, I couldn’t find ANYTHING.  Ok, THIS IS FREAK OUT TIME!! 

My stomach flipped and my heart was racing.  The guys were still out playing on the rocks, so I was determined to solve this crime before they got back.  I went up to the man selling the water bottles and tried asking him if they saw anyone break into the car.  Of course, he claimed he saw nothing.  LIAR!!  So I asked another guy selling candy, “nothing” again.  DOUBLE LIAR!!  Soon enough, a travel guide who speaks a little bit of English saw the panic in my face and came up to me asking if I needed something.  With the calmest voice I could conjure up, I asked him if he could help me look for our things, as they had been taken from our vehicle.  Luckily this nice man obliged.

With our very broken Spanish and trying to speak to our half-English speaking tour guide “friend” we called the cops.  An hour and a half later they showed up.  Good news!  They spoke NO English.  AWESOME!!*  And yes, that was sarcasm.  This provided us with the hardest language challenge since arriving in Chile.  Not only did the cops not speak English, but the office personnel didn’t either.  Trying to describe what happened and what was stolen with such small vocabulary was interesting.  And by interesting, I mean incredibly terrible!!  They seemed extremely non-helpful and not really caring about our “petty crime.”  It’s probably a conspiracy.  In any case, we filed our report (which took another 3 hours!) and headed into town to find an internet cafe to go cancel our credit cards and try to locate Chris’ cell phone with his tracking device inside his phone.  No luck.

Here’s the inventory.  Feel free to cringe along with me as I re-hash the total amount of valuables included in this robbery:

camera, my COACH purse, 1 cell phone, newly purchased sunglasses, 2 cell phone chargers, BOTH Adam’s and My Passports, a few random trinkets, Droid phone and our trust in the Chilean people and police force.

Grand Estimated Total: Around $2000.  Ouch!

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