A couple of years ago a good friend and I were travelling through Brazil and South America when, to quote American Statesman and General Colin Powell on a recent episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, “things went horribly wrong”.
In hindsight, I do blame myself. It was my decision to leave the very beautiful island paradise of Florianopolis to travel inland to visit Iguazu Falls, and so with that I must assume responsibility for us finding ourselves on the ‘Robbery Route’ between Paraguay and Rio de Janeiro. If someone had informed us of this prior, perhaps different plans might have been made. As it were, however, we blindly boarded that fateful bus, only to be awoken mere hours later in the middle of the night to the sound of frantic yelling in Portuguese.
Anyone who knows me well enough has probably heard this story multiple times – and with good reason, it is a great story. At around one in the morning a man stood up at the front of the bus, pulled out a gun and demanded the driver pull over to let his friends on. From there, the bus was led to a deserted outpost where men and cars were waiting to transport the belongings relieved from us moments earlier. While some savvy onboard thinking by yours truly managed to save our passports and ATM cards, little could be done to protect our backpacks down below.
18 hours later the bus arrived in Rio, after two additional diversions to both a state and federal police station. Upon arrival, the bus staff could only shrug when we asked what we were to do now, literally reduced to little more than the shirts on our back. Despite the obvious setbacks that come with losing practically everything you own, the next few weeks were infinitely more interesting than they otherwise would have been. Here are a few things that I learnt along the way:
1. Telling someone that you were a victim of Highway Armed Robbery in Brazil is awesome. The old adage states that no one cares about the holidays that go right, they only care about the things that go wrong. This is even more true of holidays that involve highway armed robbery when told to fellow travellers who are forced to catch the exact same methods of transport. It is the ultimate travelling one-upper, confirming our credibility in the discerning eyes of the off-the-beaten-track traversing traveller.
Whether casually dropped into conversation to impress the attractive 20-something from London, or proudly recounted to the bewildered local, the small ego boost that came with the story almost accounted for the fact that we owned absolutely nothing. It was almost enough to forget that while others were able to change into fresh clothes every so often, we became “those guys” who wore the same filthy clothes every day. This leads me to the second thing I learnt…
2. Wearing the same filthy clothes every day is awesome… Just kidding. It sucks. It really sucks. Of course personal hygiene goes out the window a bit while backpacking, especially in hot and sticky places such as Brazil, but even for two 20 year old boys the same shirt/shorts combination each day was a tad excessive. Any “advantage with the ladies” that might have been won with this story was almost immediately overturned when they came close enough to fully appreciate our physical appearance. In fairness, we could have bought new clothes, but aside from the odd novelty shirt we both resolved to try and spend as little as possible in replacing what was taken from us. Our budget was pretty tight already with beer money, and we just couldn’t afford to splurge our spare cash on clothes or any of those other ‘necessities’. We found that, after an initially steep learning curve, it is surprisingly easy to live without those things that we consider to be needs. Toiletries and shirt changes are luxuries.
A sad confession: at the time of the robbery, for one reason or another neither of us were wearing underwear. I eventually bit the bullet and bought a pair off the street (after it embarrassingly emerged that the boardshorts I purchased turned see-through when wet). My friend opted for the alternative, and simply went ‘free-balling’ for the remainder of the trip. I have never felt as dirty in my life as I did watching the colour that came out of that pair of underwear while washing them in the shower – it is the reason why, when embarking on my next trip, I made sure that a surplus of undies made it into my backpack.
Note: If you’re lucky enough to have all your belongings stolen, be prepared to spend a lot of time shirtless…
3. You really can always rely on the kindness of strangers. Really. In the days and weeks after the robbery we were inundated with kindness from people willing to help out in some small way. Travellers shouted us the odd meal or beer, helped us out with medicines from home and one British man even offered me a pair of shoes. I politely declined at the time, though it was a decision I would later regret. Big love went to our hostel in Rio de Janeiro, who gave each of us a singlet leftover from their Carnival package the week before (this isn’t a plug – at least not a paid one – but we both seriously recommend that hostel).
The standard daily attire
4. The realisation of what you can and cannot do with limited resources. On the penultimate night of Carnival in Salvador, Bahia, I lost one of my thongs (flip-flops) in a Bloco progression. In Sydney, that might have been game over for a lot of things, yet it was another 2 days or so before I bought a new pair. To be fair, roughly half of that time was spent on a return bus back to Rio, but the fact remains that I went in excess of 48 hours without owning a pair of shoes. In our heads we had convinced ourselves that havaianas would be cheaper in Rio, so we both held off on purchasing new thongs until we returned from Carnival. In the meantime, my soft feet became very acquainted with the blistering hot streets in the middle of the day. Calmly calculated business decision or complete stupidity? Almost certainly the latter, especially considering that havaianas turned out to be more expensive in Rio.
That aside, it was really interesting to discover what our lack-of-personal-items did and didn’t allow us to do. Hang-gliding without shoes? No problema. Not wearing a shirt on the streets of the city or into most street side restaurants? No need to ask. Catching a bus on the other hand – don’t even consider getting on without something on your back.
We were similarly crestfallen to discover that our sartorial shortcomings would prevent us from joining the nocturnal migration to the nightclubbing district of Lapa. Instead, we were confined to the odd tiki shack or beach bar somewhere between Copacobana and Ipanema. This was the eternal Catch 22 – we couldn’t afford jeans or proper shoes because we needed our money to buy beer, but without those two items we couldn’t actually get into the clubs that sold the beer. It was a real ‘chicken and the egg’ dilemma.
On the plus side, we never felt unsafe walking the streets of Rio – in our opinion, we’d already lost all our stuff, what more could anyone take from us? For some reason, in our heat-induced state of delirium the notion of physical harm seemed straight up impossible. Bearded, shirtless, covered in sweat and dirt – it seemed to me that people probably would have crossed to the other side of the road to avoid walking past us.
Hang-gliding … one of the many activities not requiring shoes in Brazil
5. The purchasing priorities of 20 year old boys are somewhat eschewed. Words will never be able to describe the expression on the face of the woman at the airport as we only checked in one small canvas bag and two bizarre Brazilian ‘musical instruments’ between the two of us. When we arrived back at Sydney Airport, we redistributed the various must-have items that we had purchased in the time since the robbery to the great amusement of my onlooking father.
These included: A hammock, two bottles of Cachaca (Brazilian rum), three singlets, two toothbrushes (the toothpaste got confiscated after a ‘bomb scare’ during a return layover in Buenos Aires), six pairs of havaianas, the two above-mentioned instruments, two pairs of striped novelty pants from Salvador and three brazil flag themed beach cangas (sarongs).
Underwear we apparently couldn’t afford, but Brazilian rum – damn that was a necessity! If I had my time over, would our purchases be any different? Probably not … except maybe the toothbrushes. They were something of an ‘impulse purchase’.
Our collective belongings the day we flew out of Rio de Janeiro
Of course, the list could on – the decision to never travel with anything valuable after the realisation that some of my most cherished items were gone, or the utter look of bewilderment on the faces of taxi drivers, hostel staff, travellers when they saw how little baggage we were travelling with etc. But the points listed above were probably the top five things I took away from the experience. Although it certainly made life difficult, now the story itself is probably worth a lot more to me than most of the things I lost. And, that aside, I still have a really great pair of striped pants from Salvador … which won’t be coming with me on my next trip.
never in toronto 
