Quito Crime

As I am happily sat in Denver, Colorado, and more importantly my Mum is somewhere over the Atlantic, I would like to share a little travel tale and maybe share a warning to other travellers. If you remember the first weekend I arrived in Ecuador and had a little fiasco catching my first bus to travel south from Quito and finally had to buy a second ticket and was very happy to be on a bus and on the move, well my joy was wiped out when that evening I realised that I had had my day packed rifled and someone had stolen some of my things. I had basically been scammed by the bus conductor - just before we left Quito he grabbed my bag and put it on the overhead luggage rack, I wasn't all that comfortable with this but as it was the conductor I thought that maybe it was okay - but it wasn't. I lost my ipod, my sunglasses, my rain jacket and my beloved pen knife. I cried, I wondered what the hell I was doing travelling, and most of all I was so angry with myself for being so stupid - it was my bag, I should have just kept hold of it. I also thought about going home - but as I was only 3 days in I thought that that would be rather defeatist :-) The next day I realised that they were only things, I had not lost my passport, I had not lost my credit cards and I was not physically affected, so now I had no valuables to worry about. Over the next weeks and the more people i met the more I realised just how common crime was in Ecuador, but mainly in Quito, there were first hand tales of the same thing happening to other people, someone had had their whole bag stolen, one girl had had her bag sliced whilst sitting on a bus and had had no idea that it was happening, more than one person had been mugged whilst walking around in Quito, and one peace corp volunteer who had been in Ecuador for 15 months had been robbed no less than 5 times, all whilst visiting Quito, though she was very upbeat about the whole thing and was still in Ecuador. It did not ruin my trip but it sure did make me vigilent at all times and I always caught a taxi if I happened to be out at night.