Travels on a Motorbike

Last night I was talking with one of the owners at the hostel, here in San Jose, about a girl that had her US$1000 camera and her wallet stolen at a bus stop nearby. The usual stuff. Being careful with your possessions and not showing items of value in public. It’s sad but not surprising she got her camera stolen when it was in an expensive looking camera case. What do you expect to happen if you’re not careful? Why don’t tourists realise they’re easy targets? etc.

Oh how foolish I feel now. I’ve just come back from a rather slick and, in my opinion, very ballsy scam orchestrated by a guy called Tony. I doubt I’ll see Tony again. There’s a chance that the owners of my hostel might, which will become clear, and I hope they break his legs. However, when I look back at the chain of events it is me that is to blame and I’ll have to put this down to a US$150 lesson in naivety and misplaced trust. When you read the following I’m sure you will be amazed at how easily I was conned and nothing like that would happen to you. All I can say in my defense is that a culmination of small reassurances, subterfuge and my overwhelming desire to fix my bike enabled Tony to rip me off like a tourist…

As you know I have some brake parts being shipped over from England and unfortunately they appear to be held up in customs at San Jose airport. This afternoon I got talking to a guy called Tony in the sitting room of our hostel. Tony said he lived on the coast and was in San Jose for business. I assumed Tony was staying here because he was in the hostel. I later found out that he had talked his way in by saying he was waiting for friends to turn up before he checked in. He also did something clever by asking the front desk if he could change a $100 bill (within my earshot) and then making out that they couldn’t. Anyway, once Tony heard I had a package held up in customs he told me he had someone there that would be able to get it out today for about $50. He called the guy with my shipment number and said that we would meet him in town in an hour. When I look back on this it seems fantastical and I’m embarrassed at how easily fooled I’ve been but at the time I was so keen to get those parts that all reasonable judgement was put aside. So off we walked to a casino bar in town to meet the guy. As we entered the establishment Tony acted as if he was a regular and security staff knew him, although on reflection the nods he gave people weren’t actually reciprocated. I bought us a couple of drinks and gave him the 20,000 colones for my package from customs and also 55,000 colones for the US$100 he needed to change. He put both on the bar in front of us. Why I didn’t ask for his US$100 there and then I do not know but we were talking about places to for me to visit, if he could visit me in England, his business plans, trust, locals ripping of tourists, etc. and it just didn’t feel like the right time. He also gave the impression that he frequented the place often and had an account there. All of which went some way to reassuring me that he was genuine, including the fact that I met him in my hostel. After a couple of minutes of chat he indicated that the guy with my package was in the doorway behind me, picked up ALL the money, said he’d be back in a couple of minutes and was gone. By the time my slow brain realised he had left with EVERYTHING and I had NOTHING of his and no information about him he must have been long gone (and chuckling to himself all the way). Like taking candy from a baby.

I asked the bar lady if she knew him and she said she’d seen him a few times before but he didn’t have an account. Customers didn’t have accounts. I went downstairs and asked the security manager where he had gone and if they could get me an image of us from their cameras. Apparently he had walked out quickly and the CCTV footage was too dark to get a clear shot of us. I have no idea what I would have done with the image though, especially as the curcumstances by which I’d pretty much ripped myself off were so absurd I doubt the police could have done much but laugh. I can see it now: “So you gave this guy US$150 in cash, in a bar in the centre of town about an hour after meeting him?” “Well my dear little gringo, you deserve to lose that money.”

After 20 mintues I decided to head back to the hostel in the vain hope that someone might know something about him, although by this time I guessed that he probably wasn’t staying there. Turns out that they do know him but only because he ripped another couple off in a similar fashion the week before! Unfortunately a failure of communication between staff prevented anyone from alerting me to this at the time. One of the staff that knew who he was is out of the country and the other one either didn’t register it was him or didn’t think it important enough to tell anyone! Also, by talking to various different groups in the hostel Tony managed to create the impression that enough, disconnected people knew him for others to assume he was legitimate. It was only afterwards we all discovered that none of us did. I actually admire the guy for having the balls to come into a locked building and run the same scam in a hostel only a week or so after pulling it off the first time. I’m a bit miffed at the hostel for not identifying him and throwing him out immediately. But mostly I’m surprised and ashamed at how easily I was conned. The funny thing is that at times I thought I might be being conned or would soon be robbed in an alley but once we were into it I didn’t want to accuse him or make a scene. How English is that?!?

With any luck he’ll be back to pick up some other fool before I leave and justice can be metered out. Although he was twitching and yawning like he had a coke habit so I’m undecided on vengance or forgiveness as yet. I can always leave San Jose (just $150 lighter) whereas he may be stuck here in some kind of miserable drugs rut. What goes around come around.