WHO SAYS NOTHING EVER HAPPENS IN BAHÍA? (No. 1)
Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador, Monday, August 27, 2007

Every cruiser seems to have at least one story about muggings in the Mariscal District of Quito. And, one fellow-Canadian was hit upon in broad daylight on the touristy Guayaquil Malecón (river walk) by three ladies who drugged his coke with a date-rape drug and took him along to sign his own credit card in one store after another. Fortunately, a store security card called the police because of the little group’s rather strange behaviour. And then there are the stories of the Big-City Express Abductions: you can be held up or kidnapped while your car is stopped at a red light. Or you can just pay up and drive on without further molestation. By comparison to Columbia, Venezuela and much of the Caribbean, Ecuador’s crime levels are still tolerable, thank goodness, and Bahía is considered muy seguro. Even Canoa, the surfing town farther up the coast some twenty miles is considered more dangerous because it is a narco-centre what with all the young people there. A young English woman was in fact gang-raped one night on the beach a month or two ago and it is reported that they also tried to kill her by pressing her head in the sand. The girl is very plucky and did not immediately make a dash for the airport but stayed to help the police. Not sure where that case is now.

This part of the story, however, is less horrific. Regular readers of this blog might recall that Kathleen and I were also robbed at gunpoint in Venezuela last May, trussed up by two masked guys who plundered the house we were supposed to be sitting as a preventative measure for just such things. Anyway, we are no longer totally surprised by events. We’re old pros now. But, arriving back on the boat one afternoon after a few hours in the cyber-café, I realised I had left my cell phone at the computer desk. Of course, it was long gone by the time I got back. I am trying to line up a good Spanish speaker to call my own phone number on the off chance that the possessor actually is looking for the rightful owner. How likely is that?

At the same cyber-café, Kathleen went into the restroom and then left the cyber-café a few minutes later forgetting the snazzy new Panama hat that she had bought in Cuenca while we were there with William. That really annoyed her even more than me losing the cell phone: I am notoriously absent-minded. Even as a post-grad student I personally contributed a large share of the umbrellas left on London Transport’s Northern Line tube trains. I was therefore secretly glad about the hat so that I would not to be in the limelight now.

The hat and the cell phone went missing last Friday. Mondays there is a household goods, clothing and shoe market in Bahía. We decided we needed to spend a little money to buy some underwear, sandals, etc. and walked over to the open-air mercado this morning while they were still setting up. While I was turning over the goods and negotiating with a lady for some very fetching underpants, I looked across to another table to see a young man wearing a white Panama hat. This in itself would not be totally unusual: after all Panama hats come from nearby Montecristi. But this one look strangely familiar: it had an dark blue embroidered hat band and a dark chin string, both of which were custom jobs when Kathleen bought the hat in Cuenca. In my modest Spanish I said to the man that, “Este sombrero es de mi esposa!” (or words to that effect). He laughed in an embarrassed way and looked mildly puzzled. “Tu esposa?” The people he had been talking with stopped to watch the action. I went over to him. He told me he had bought it for $5 from a guy on the street. It was good quality and so he bought it. “Some guy,” he said. So I offered him $5 for it and he sold it (back) to me. Then Kathleen and he had their photos taken for fun. After he left with a big bag of white cotton socks and some still-packaged underwear, the lady told me that he was a regular customer of theirs. Perhaps he has a shop in town and was buying stock cheaply at the mercado for on-sale to the tourists at a mark-up. Now if only I could find my cell phone!

Who says nothing ever happens in Bahía?