Robbed

7.25.2007

Griff and I were robbed last night. In our hotel room. At 1:30 in the morning. We had been reading and talking and did that whole, I´ll brush my teeth after I close my eyes for just one minute...¨So we fell asleep. With our lights on. And our door unlocked.

We awoke to the sound of several knocks on the door. There are electrical lights outside the window, so its hard to tell the time. In my groggy state, I thought we had overslept and they were telling us that we needed to check out of the hotel. Griff thought it was 9:30 in the morning.

I opened the door and a man was panting and leaning over. Do you speak English? Yeah? Good. Americans? I´m from California. Yeah. Listen, I lost my credit cards and there´s a big emergency at home. I need to call. I need to call home. The hotel owner won´t give me nothing. If you could just give me 50 Q. I´m in room 12. 50Q and I´ll pay you back tomorrow. Agitated, he wrote his name and hotel number down.

I thought about shutting the door, but as he was talking he had moved pretty close and I didn´t want to provoke him.

Griff got out of bed and handed him 100 Q because we didn´t have a 50.

He left, promising to pay us back tomorrow.

¨That was freaky,¨I told Griff. On the back of the piece of paper he had handed us was a hodgepodge of photocopied images. Tourists, devils, 666, and pornographic pictures.

We locked our door and tried to sleep. But the guy had seen our room and we thought he might have scoped it out to come back with others. It wouldn´t be hard to pick the lock, and because the hotel opens onto a courtyard, there is a large window next to the door. Griff went to the bathroom and there was a ton of noise outside the room. He came back to the room with beer bottles and two long bamboo sticks. Which, in case you are wondering, are not very effective against people with knives and guns. Bamboo sticks are the weapons you get demoted to in action games. Its below the fist but slightly above the wet noodle. They looked menacing that night but ridiculous the next morning. Griff said we could have poked them in an attempt to annoy them to death.

We tried to sleep, but as Griff put it, ¨I keep waking up every time a bird chirps. They shouldn´t be chirping at this time. Grab the beer bottle of safety, he´s coming back with his friends.¨

The next morning, waiting for the bathroom, I told another guest our story. He´s a Guatemalan who does business in the area often and always stays at this hotel. (Labelled in Lonely Planet as ¨secure.¨)
¨I think he saw you,¨he said, pointing at me. ¨I think he followed you.¨Griff suspected the same thing. The robber seemed to get very nervous when he saw a big guy in the room. At least, a big guy by Guatemalan standards. I had been walking around by myself for part of the day, and had entered our hotel room alone. So if he had followed me, as the Guatemalan business man suspected, he could have easily assumed that it was just me in the room. As Griff put it,¨Either he decided to fuck a couple of gringos out of 6 dollars at 1 in the morning, or he was planning an assault.¨If it had been just me, it would have been pretty easy for him to take everything.

We left our hotel early this morning.

It´s a good thing that the average Guatemalan is 5´5, which makes Griff look like a gringo giant. Besides, we were packing the beer bottles of safety and the bamboo sticks of annoyance. I suspect that we think this is funny only because we´re sleep deprived and tripping on adrenalin. And, in the absence of any concrete action we can take, laughing seems to be the only option.