To Catch a Thief or Catch My Breath - A Stolen Camera at 9000 Feet
by Angie Brenner
Ah, the tiny La Casa Sol Hotel, colorful yet a bit sad in that it's on the fringe of a 'bad' neighborhood in the Marascal District. The cheery breakfast room looks across the street at green metal warehouse doors filled with graffiti....FUCK OFF, SKINS, SKINS!, PUTAS, and other such obscene comments I can't decipher. Just the sort of place Paul Theroux would love to hate. Me, too, as a matter of fact. However, the staff is congenial and accommodating.
After many warnings about theft in Quito, this morning I carelessly walked through the Old Town with my small camera slung on my wrist for easy access. The first photo op was a man on the corner of Avenue Guayaquil peeling coconuts. No sooner had I clicked the shutter and dropped my hand to continue walking (rather than opening the backpack and sticking the camera inside), than I felt a slight tug at my wrist. I turned just as a man snapped the camera from its thin strap, and ran.
Stunned, I watched him speed away, a squat male in jeans and navy windbreaker. When he turned up Avenue Galapagos, I felt the anger rise and took up the chase, no easy feat considering Quito's 9,000 ft elevation. I began to run up the hill and stairs leading into a Mercado and spotted him ducking into the market place. I wanted to catch and pummel him. THAT would be the story I'd tell my friends later. He wasn't that fast and had I not had the "deer in the headlights" moment, I might have caught up with him. But, he was long gone.
A few women who had watched the event sympathized with my plight, "Bandito,"one of them said, and pretended to beat him up with a pole. As I continued on my way to see the obligatory churches of the old city, I spotted a couple of policeman. THEY should at least know what happened two blocks away. How are tourists going to visit with this threat hovering?
Soon, I was whisked away in a police car with two male officers and one female officer back to the scene of the crime. They didn't seem to understand that it was faster to walk the two blocks back, so they insisted on driving. They drove around through traffic until finally the woman suggested that we walk the marketplace. She lead us down dreay alleys lined with oily car and machine parts and tools. "This is where they come to sell cameras," she said.
Wow, wouldn´t that be a great story, I thought, to catch the guy selling my Olympus. Finally, like me, she too decided to give up the hunt. With her Asian features, she looked like a model in the dirt brown, uniform of slacks and bombardier jacket and military style hat, the kind that looks equally dapper perched square on the head or carried under an arm in Top Gun fashion. She seemed relieved when I declined to "go to the station" to make an official report.
It occurred to me later, under the shadows of spires, bell towers, and church domes, while passing shop after shop selling religious paraphernalia of crosses, Jesus pictures, and every possible version of Mary, that Catholicism can be very cloying. And, if everyone is so religious, why is crime an epidemic? Is it the devastating poverty? Or, like the US, perhaps drugs play a factor?
But on my first day, still disoriented from a long journey, I wonder, How many Hail Marys for my camera?