Plan:

1. Arrive in the morning at the bus terminal

2. Spend the rest of my Colombian pesos on copious amounts of food

3. Get my yellow fever shot (Colombia is a “red flag” country – read more about travel requirements here)

4. Go to the famous street art walking tour prior to

5. Taking an 11 PM flight back to Costa Rica.

Reality:

After getting coffee with Douwe and on my way to shoot up at the Red Cross, a middle aged man stops me. He asked me where I was from. “China? Japón?”

I get asked this question. A lot. My reflexive answer: “No, Estados Unidos.” He proceeds to walk with me down the road to the mall asking how many days I was staying. “Diez días.” He then touches my arm while he whips out his wallet with a business card (hint hint) that says Policía Nacional.

OH FUCK, I think to myself.

“The police station is over there,” he says, pointing in no general direction (hint hint).

Another man walks up. “Where is the police station?”

“We go.”

WHAT!

“How much money are you carrying?” the first man asks. “Many tourists come to this country to buy drugs and weapons.”

Me? Drugs? No way! I struggle to remember the conversion rate of Colombian pesos. What’s $600 US in Colombian pesos, and how do I say that in Spanish? What did I put on my airport immigration form? Do I calculate how much I spent or how much I brought? Is mil a million or a thousand?

“We’ll need your passport number and name.”

At least I know that by heart. These dudes have me so stressed out right now!

But I’m now myself opening up my wallet to count my money and the man is helping me identify the notes. And asking if I’m carrying any cards.

And then he walks away. With my cash. And one debit card (not credit).

“Is he walking to the police station?” I think to myself. Oh wait. He isn’t coming back. I look around, speechless. A few workers in a truck are looking in my direction. Then I hear is te robaron. They robbed you.

The second guy has already booked it the other way but straight into the police. I run to the police, shocked and confused. Unable to put together a damn sentence. “The man took my money!” They already have the accomplice in handcuffs.

And so my last day in Bogotá is spent in various police stations. At the outpost near to where they apprehended my guy, they stuck us literally feet apart as I swore at him in Spanish. We then both went into a squad car – me in the front, accomplice in the back. The accomplish pulls out his phone and is talking to somebody. I obviously can’t tell what he’s saying and I’m looking at our driver to see his reaction. Is this normal? The fuck is going on? I guess the driver senses that I’m trying to read the situation. Instead of helping, he smiles at me and says I’m pretty.

I am at the central police station to give a formal statement. I finally have an interpreter who can explain the situation in English to me. He says he is from the “tourist police” division and wears a reflective vest slightly different from his counterpart that drove me here. Neither one seems to totally know what’s going on, but he’s nice about it. He’s slightly lanky with a nice smaller and he doesn’t look like he could be much older than me. He later tells me, in one of the many waiting periods, that he wants to go back to the university to study software engineering. For now, he’s using his English knowledge to assist American victims of glaringly obvious scams.

“How much time will this guy get?” I ask. He responds, “Three to five years. Impersonating the police is a serious offense.”

This is perhaps the part of my trip where I realized that my cutesy tourist Spanglish really wouldn’t cut it. This whole day – and it’s frustrations – had been marked by my inability to understand what was actually going on. (That was a really painful sentence to write.) I wanted to ask. What’s going to happen to the accomplice? Is he going to give his partner up to shorten his sentence? Will he even go to jail? How did you catch him so fast? Can I punch him? Will I get anything back?

I sat on a chair as workers filed in and out of the office for maybe a total of three hours. I did get a police report as a souvenir, though.

It’s 5 PM now and to dump salt on the wound, my interpreter asks if I could get a taxi back as there were “no squad cars available”. I want to ask how it’s possible that nobody can drive me somewhere that is supposedly “close” to the station. But I’m drained.

“I don’t have any money,” I said. “Me robaron.”

It was 5 pm now and I still had to get my yellow fever shot to get before the Red Cross closes. I’ve been thinking about that this whole day. Forget my money, I’ll have wasted a flight if they won’t even let me into Nicaragua.

I thank the interpreter for his help and give him a hug. The police chief of whatever the fuck personally apologizes to me and says my embassy might be contacting me in the future. In retrospect, it seems like this was just the cherry on top of a whole lot of CYA nonsense that I did not ask for!

They have Uber in Bogotá. However, I had used up all my data on the Colombian SIM card.

So I had to go around the corner to the gas station and top up my SIM using my remaining credit card. On the way a guy stopped me. “No entiendo,” I said not trying to get scammed again as soon as I leave the police station.

“Oh, are you American?” the guy said in perfect English.

“Yeah, I’m from San Francisco. I’m just visiting here but I’m actually just got robbed…”

“That sucks. Do you have any money to spare?”