A little rain must fall

8 March, Santiago, Chile

“Into every life a little rain must fall”. We have used this quotation before, last time we were in South America, when we almost lost our debit card to an ATM in the small Bolivian town of Uyuni. Seems that we are always just one distracted moment away from potential disasters when we travel. We have put petrol in a motorhome’s water tank, locked ourselves out of apartments in Krakow and Warsaw, locked ourselves out of our van in Gjor, Hungary, been turned away from the Polish border, been robbed by police in Romania, stopped the trams in Budapest by driving the wrong way over a tram-only bridge, driven 100 kms on a Spanish autopista with no brakes and blown a tyre at full speed on a Spanish autopista. But yesterday’s disaster tops all of these.

We felt like old hands in Santiago. We had been here before and are the coolest couple of public transport users around. So, loaded up with two backpacks each, we jumped on the airport bus to the metro station of Los Heroes in downtown Santiago, from where we took the subway to Manuel Montt station at the end of the street where our AirBnB apartment is located. What we hadn’t bargained for was the fact that the subway was packed for the lunchtime rush. We were sardined into a corner where some light-fingered bastard gently prised apart the zips on one of our bags and took off with our passports, credit cards and a not insignificant amount of cash.

So panic stations.

We had our credit cards cancelled within 30 minutes (luckily, we have back-up cards) and were on the metro to the Australian Embassy inside the hour. Paperwork was begun to secure emergency passports and new passport photos taken.

This morning we were at the Embassy at 9:00 am, had our forms completed and lodged by 9:30 and were off playing tourist for the remainder of the day. Last night and this morning we commenced the horrendous task of redirecting our multitude of direct debit payments. By 4:00 pm we had our new temporary passports and were almost back on track. Tomorrow we have to go back out to the airport to see the International Police to get a replacement for our Chile Tourist cards that were inside our passports. These we will need to exit the country.

All part of the independent travel experience.

A special thanks to the fantastic staff of the Australian Embassy in Santiago.