My pocket is picked

 Tom’s quest for Ecuadorian citizenship continues today with another trip to Riobamba. I wasn’t going – it was my job to look after Aureliano – and I was sorry to be missing the rendition of the national anthem. It’s strange that every country’s national anthem (with the exception of Japan’s) sounds more cheerful than ours. God save the Queen is such a dirge … few people believe in God any longer and fewer care about the Queen. It would be nice to have a jolly tune (like Italy’s) or something we could all get behind. Good luck with that: following Brexit, I have never known the country to be so divided.

Anyway, it was my job to look after The Quacker and he was much better as the day wore on. After lunch, Carlos asked me if I wanted to go to one of Ambato’s markets with him (he needed a few provisions), so we piled into the pick-up and set off. There are a few markets in Ambato (three I think) and I’ve been to a couple with Tom already, but not this one.

The markets sell different things (or specialise in different things) and they are like old-fashioned market halls in Britain, the ones we’ve mostly knocked down. Northwich used to have an amazing old half-timbered market with an upstairs gallery. I can remember vividly the smells of the place when I was a small boy going there with my mother. One corner smelled strongly of cheese and another of fish (I hated that bit). The hall was all wonky and bent, probably due to mining subsidence, but it had real character. The council knocked it down and built the most awful 1970s shopping arcade and open market. It was never the same.

Ambato’s market halls are newer than the old Northwich one, and bigger, but the layout is the same. Perhaps the originals had been destroyed in the great earthquake, but they’d had the good sense to keep the same design. Carlos bought some meat from downstairs and then we went upstairs to buy a food treat that Aureliano particularly likes. Obviously, my height, pale skin and clothes make me stand out as a foreigner and, although it was not as marked as Tom and I in Simiatug, I’m still easy to spot. This day, I was spotted by criminals. I’d had many lectures about being careful of pickpockets (and heeded them) but I was still robbed. I was carrying Aureliano, with my phone (a fairly old iPhone 6) in my zipped-up side-pocket. As we reached the top of the stairs, following Carlos, some people walked in front and across me, causing me to stop and step back. I was trying not to be pushed on the stairs, but I was conscious of a slight shove behind me. In two steps I realised my phone had gone. They’d successfully distracted me, unzipped my pocket and lifted my phone. It was a pretty well-organised and slick operation and I have to admire their skill.

It was a bit annoying, but I felt bad for Carlos who had taken me for a treat but thought he’d not looked after me properly. I’d been robbed on his watch. It was clearly just one of those things – expect to be robbed in a poor country when you’re wandering around with a sticker in your hat saying: “rich foreign tourist”. I felt a bit naked without my phone, it was a link home and also my camera, so I’m glad it hadn’t happened earlier in the holiday.

About an hour later, Tom and Lucy phoned. They’d had a WhatsApp message from someone claiming to have found my phone. What was my Apple ID? If we told them they’d unlock the Find My Phone feature and return it to me. We were so relieved but, of course, I couldn’t remember my ID or password. Just as well because it was a scam. They’d got into my phone and found my WhatsApp contacts, but couldn’t access other things. Had I remembered my log-in credentials, they’d have got into my account and could have used Apple Pay, unlocked the phone and locked me out.

We realised it was a scam after looking on the internet. Google “stolen iPhone scams” and it’s full of victims who gave their details to people who had “found” their phone and wanted to return it. For once, my senior memory lapse had been a help.

I had to go onto my laptop to block the phone (my laptop remembers my Apple ID, fortunately), also phone the UK to get my SIM card blocked and order a new one for when I got home. That evening, I filled in a police report online and got a PDF of an incident report and crime number immediately. Some things work so much better than they do in the UK! Of course, my insurance was useless – I’d dropped “valuables out of the home” from my house insurance to save money and my travel insurance had a £200 excess. When I got back to the UK, I used my old iPhone 5 and then bought a second-hand 6 on the internet for £100. A year later, I’m still using it.

On the plane home, I sat next to a young woman, a student doctor who had been doing her elective in Peru and she’d had her phone robbed on the first day, so perhaps I got away lightly. The good news of the day – apart from escaping a potentially more damaging scam – was that Tom passed his citizenship test with flying colours.

After around six months, he can apply for citizenship and get an Ecuadorian passport. Little did we realise in August 2019, that the next time he was going to be in Ecuador would be in the middle of Covid-19 pandemic!