my wallet: a life story

5 years ago, I went to Italy to visit my friend Christina. Whilst in Florence I bought a lovely wallet: soft brown leather, the perfect shape and size. Christina was very annoyed with me as apparently it is bad luck to buy your own wallet. I thought that was superstitious nonsense.

2 days later I left Tino in Florence and travelled to Rome, the very first time I had ever been away on my own. Rome is lovely, and I spent a full days sightseeing, so busy that I had forgotten to eat. At 6pm I realised I was starving, so caught the metro accross town to my hotel. Then disaster struck. A nasty little man put his nasty hands into my bag and took my wallet. I could see it happening, but there were hundreds of people around, and he disappeared as quickly as he had taken it, so there was nothing I could do.

Stupid as I was, all of my money and all of my cards were in that wallet. Its a very humbling experience when you don´t even have enough money for a packet of crisps when you are starving. I went to the tourist police station, the Italian police were absolutely useless. I went back to my (thankfully pre-paid) hotel room, with my stomach rumbling, not having any idea what to do. I needed to cancel my cards but I didn´t know the phone number. I didn´t speak a word of Italian. In the end I went to the British embassy, and burst into tears. They were brilliant, they gave me a cup of tea (doesn´t the whole world seem better if you have a cup of tea), and sorted me out.

I was just as upset about losing my lovely wallet than the money, so back in Florence Tino bought me a replica version, and put some money in it for good luck.

Then passed a couple of years without incident, til I started work. I´ve lost count of the number of times people came up to me at my desk, to return my wallet. I´d left it in the crew room loads of times, the gym, the showers, etc. I remember going out in Fleet a few times and having to borrow money off friends because I´d left my wallet in my desk.

In Australia I left it on a bench outside a bus station whilst I caugt a bus to Cairns. It was returned to me the next day by a friendly bus driver, all money and cards intact.

In Bali I managed to leave it in two restaurants, going back hours later to find it still there, which is surprising as Bali is a poor island. Its like I couldn´t get rid of the thing, until last Sunday.

After managing to survive an overnight train journey, I was about to board a bus at Ororo in central Bolivia. 3 big men surrounded me, taking it in turns to push me around. I thought they were after my bag, which was on my back, so I turned towards them to get my bag out of the way, and yelled at them, then they disappeared with my wallet which was in a zipped up pocket.

The bastards, they obviously targeted me as I was alone - there were loads of other travellers about (in couples) who saw the whole thing but were powerless to help. There was nothing I could have done, I´d be pretty defenceless against 3 men. An annoying thing is that it was 8 o´clock in the morning in a crowded bus station, its not like I was stupid enough to be wandering around dodgy areas or late at night. At least I wasn´t physically hurt.

Anyway, after that experience in Italy I knew I would be ok, as I keep loads of emergency cash and a spare credit card. It´ll be enough to see me through the next couple of weeks. The incident did shake me up though, and it took a huge effort in La Paz not to go and hide in my hotel room the whole time. La Paz can be pretty scary, but I´ll write about that in another post.