After such a nice day yesterday, it was hard to follow it with another excellent day.  And today was certainly NOT an excellent day – in fact it was almost the opposite.  The nice part of the day was sleeping in.  The room at the hotel was very nice and comfortable.  We had been camping for the last few weeks and the room was a nice change.

When we awoke, we decided to take a walk on the beach before leaving town for Lima.  We walked over to a set of cement stairs that followed the cliff wall as it drops down to the beach.  We were following a family with kids and weren’t thinking much of the situation when we noticed two men walking up the stairs.  They looked suspicious, kind of dirty and a little interested in us.  We only noticed them about 10 seconds before they got to us.  Since we are a minority here, we are used to people staring at us as we walk by.  However, these 2 men looked at us a little differently, and both Chad and I discussed feeling uneasy about them when we talked about things afterwards.  They approached kind of quickly and parted as we walked between them.  We felt somewhat relieved after they passed, but a second or two later a third man jumped off the hillside and promptly held a gun against Chad’s stomach.  The other two men turned back around and began feeling our clothes for personal items.  They weren’t holding me, and I had an urge to run but I looked down at Chad and that’s when I realized that the third man had a gun pointing at Chad.  We had discussed the possibility of being robbed a few times in the past, and we knew that if we just cooperated and gave the robbers what they wanted the chances of us getting hurt were probably considerably less.  I stayed put and both of us raised our arms to let them take whatever they wanted.

Fortunately, it only took them about 30 seconds to go through our pockets.  After the robbers were done, they ran off up the hill and didn’t hurt us.  Some of the people on the beach noticed what was going on and were now yelling at the robbers.  This was in broad daylight at 11:00 in the morning.  The local people who noticed the robbery on the beach below were upset as well and told us to wait for the police.  They called the police and seemed confident the police would find the robbers and we’d get our things back.  One lady gave Chad a soda as we were waiting and a couple people spoke to us like they knew the three robbers.  Apparently they were a few local drug addicts.  The police came and spoke with a few of the people and then drove us to the police station where we put in a report and looked through a book with photos of criminals to see if we recognized anyone.  We both realized that we hadn’t really looked at the three robbers very well.  I couldn’t really describe them.  All I remember is looking at the gun and then looking down at the ground a lot after that.  Chad remembers looking at the gun but doesn’t remember what the three men looked like either.  It was a weird thing to happen and we are both glad that we are okay.  They took my wallet but that only had 30 soles in it which is about $10.  I didn’t have any other ID or credit card on me at all.  Chad had his plastic watch, car keys, and the little replacement camera stolen.  We now again have no functioning camera.  All said and done we were out about $175.  It could have been much worse.  The important thing is that no one got hurt.  Because the robbers saw our hotel room key, we asked the police to stop on the way to the station to check on the car and warn the hotel that some robbers had our car keys.  When we got back to the hotel we checked out for safety’s sake and moved to the Hotel Chavez – the nicest hotel in town where the police recommended we stay.  The room was three times as expensive, $28 for the night but we hoped if we waited there a day that maybe we’d get some of our things back.  This didn’t happen.

So that’s another adventure to pack away in our life’s little book of adventures.  There are lots of things to be learned in retrospect, but these experiences happen so quickly sometimes and when a gun is involved there isn’t much you can do or should do except give them everything you have.  Paul Graddon, one of Chad’s friends who is a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala once told us that “it’s better to be a coward for 5 minutes than to spend the rest of your life dead.”  We agree.  We are happy that no one got hurt and we are a bit wiser for the future.

Now that this experience is over and we can look back at it, here’s a few lessons we thought we’d share for any friends, family, fellow travelers, or anyone who might unfortunately find themselves in this situation someday.

Things that helped us when we were robbed:
1.    We only had about $10 on us.  When we pull money out of an ATM we usually pull out about $200 at a time.  We carry a little money with us, and then leave the rest hidden in our Volkswagen.  Chad had no money on him for the day and we both left all our credit cards back in Mango.  Sometimes we carry money in our socks.  This day we didn’t but we noticed the robbers never checked or frisked our socks.
2.    We cooperated fully with the robbers, didn’t make a scene, or get angry.  We just gave them what they wanted and they were on their way.  They seemed pretty nervous and jittery when they were robbing us.  We were pretty sure that if we didn’t give them a reason to hurt us they probably weren’t going to.

Here’s what we could have done better.
1.    Asked the guy at the hotel front desk the safest way to walk down to the beach.
2.    Walked down to the beach with a group of people rather than trailing behind them.
3.    Left the room key at the front desk, or better yet, took the key off the chain so we had it but the tag identifying our hotel was back in the room.
4.    Chad was in flip flops and he thought in retrospect that if he needed to run, this was going to be hard to do without shoes.
5.    Not go on this trip, but then again, there’s plenty of drug addicts who hold people up in the states too.

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