first a swim, then a mugging!!!

After breakfast this morning I set off my bike for a swim at Laguna Apoyo. A rather rough road –mud sand and rocks took a good 40 minutes to negotiate. The bike map suggested 20 but neglected to add (if your name is Lance Armstrong. The fact that it was mostly uphill didn’t help either. Parking my bike with a couple of security people I hiked down what is described as a cow-path for about 20 minutes before arriving at the lake. I enjoyed a 15-minute swim which was interrupted by the arrival of a very horny visitor who was in need of a drink. Not wishing to get in the way of a thirsty steer, I grabbed my things and made a fast retreat up the hill, only to find 20 or 30 more on their way down. Parking myself behind a tree, I waited until they and the men driving them had gone past before I continued up the hill.

   Still wet from my swim, I left my swimming shorts on and stuffed my towel and other gear into my backpack before returning to pick up my bike. With the route being mostly downhill I was travelling at a decent speed with about a km. to go to reach town. Suddenly I found two men wearing masks and carrying machetes were rushing out of the bush to block my path. Within seconds the bike was down and I was rolling across the roadbed, scraping off skin as I went. Holding me down they tore off my backpack, ripped the pocket out of my swimsuit that was holding the camera and raced back into the bush.

  Sore, shook up and bleeding from my arm and leg I wasted no time in jumping back on the bike and rushing back to the hotel. Taking inventory of my losses, I was missing my backpack, shorts, towel, hotel key, 3 imitrex tablets, 2 sleeves of antihistamines, about $30, my drivers license, my smaller ((point and shoot) digital camera and my notebook.

  Most annoying was the loss of two days worth of great photos and video, plus 3 weeks of journal entry about the trip that I was planning to turn into travel articles at some point.

 Amelia, one of the hotel staff got me all cleaned up and drowned most of my shredded skin with proviodine. Lucy the hotel owner was extremely helpful and very sympathetic, but, as I already knew, told me filing a police report would be a waste of time.

  Paul, from the restaurant up the street offered to have a friend drive me back to see if anything e.g. my notebook or clothing had been dumped by the side of the road, but I just decided to call it a “life experience” and move on. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and a couple of seconds here and there can make a whole lot of difference in how stuff happens

  As I sit typing this up, my right leg feels like it has been soaked in acid. But what burns even more is the fact that I had taken some amazing photos of myself swimming in the lake, plus some really crazy video of the cattle stampeding down to the water.

  But what the heck- I could have been bleeding to death from a machete wound in the middle of nowhere.  

            Now I have a “You think you had a shitty day! Let me tell you about………”