That One Time I Got Mugged in Colombia

I still remember the cold steel of the knife blade against my neck. I remember thinking, “Is this really happening?”, “Am I about to be stabbed?”, “Will I ever see Thalita again?”, “Hopefully Thalita will be able to transport my body home”, “How am I going to explain this to Chris’s girlfriend?”. Those and a thousand other thoughts went through my head in mere seconds. As I’ve read with other “traumatic events”, the details of this experience seem to be seared into my brain, and I doubt I’ll ever forget them.

To preface this tale, I absolutely love Colombia and regularly refer to it as one of my favorite countries I’ve traveled to. Muggings happen literally everywhere, even where I live in Orlando, all the time. So don’t let this post put you off from visiting Colombia. Please please go, it’s really an amazing place. This is just a post to share some of the other side of things that happen to travelers on the road. It’s not always carefree beaches and smiles.

I’ll back up a bit. It was 2010 and Chris, one of my best friends from high school, and I had been trying to plan a backpacking trip together for a while. I found some killer flight prices from Florida to Colombia and that sealed the deal. Cheap flights, mountains, beaches…..yes please. So we flew off for 3 weeks to a place everyone told us not to go. But it was wonderful and we didn’t regret it for a moment…until the last few days.

To start my last few days, I lost my iPhone on a bus from Villa de Leyva to Bogota. I got carsick, took some Dramamine, and passed out….with my phone on my lap. So it dropped to the floor while I was doped up, and I never saw it again. So too with all the photos I had taken on it (the one below I emailed to Thalita while traveling). Then, on our first day in Bogota, our airline had a pilot strike, we were effectively stranded, and had to beg our girlfriends to buy us some last minute high price tickets home.

Ok on to the mugging…

We were staying in La Candelaria, a neighborhood in Bogota known for its beautiful colonial architecture and also a thriving backpacker scene. We got some cheap hostel beds and met some great travelers from all over the world. We went to many local bars and coffee houses, listened to local bands play, shared bottles of aguardiente with students at the local universities…..and we loved this truly authentic neighborhood.

One evening, Chris and I, and our new friend Paul from Texas, decided to go find a bite to eat. Pretty early too, at about 10PM, it felt fairly safe to just meander the streets looking for a decent place to eat. We had only walked a few blocks away from our hostel when we started to feel a bit uncomfortable. I remember seeing this teenager with a puffy white jacket eerily staring at us as we walked by, and after another block or so we decided to turn around and head back.

Hilariously (explained in a bit), the very last thing I did before things turned sour was zip up my nice jacket and admire to myself how long this jacket will last me in my travels. Hahahaha. So I look up from zipping my jacket, and the shiny metal catches my eye. It was the the dude in the puffy white jacket in front of us. As my mind realizes it’s a knife, I hear the words, “Money, money, money!” Shit. This is really happening.

I’m in the middle of my two friends, and we’re standing at the top of a hill. My first thought is, “Run!” Thinking that’s also my friends’ thoughts, I start what was the shortest run of my life. As my leg begins the first step, multiple dudes on both sides of us grab Paul and Chris. And two steps later, another guy meets me, grabs my jacket collar and shoves a knife against my neck. That’s truly a life changing feeling. Everything I’ve ever read about muggings, it’s “give them your stuff”, “don’t resist”, and this is generally the best advice. So that’s what I was thinking for a millisecond, but having the knife touching your skin makes you acutely aware of your potential death.

Not sure of this guy’s intentions, and my survival, I made the split second choice to fight. It definitely wasn’t going to be a rad, Van Damme high-kicking, choreographed set of martial arts skills, but I was going to get this knife away from my throat. He had ahold of the hood and collar of my jacket, controlling my movements pretty well, so I grabbed the hand with the knife, and attempted to slip out of the jacket. As this happened, he fought back, and having ahold of my jacket, slung me to the ground. I had no idea if the guy was going to follow me to the ground and continue his attack. I’ve been angry many times in life, but what I felt next was the closest to true rage I think I’ve ever experienced. I stood up in a fury, ready to annihilate this dude. I had accepted that I might be stabbed or killed…..but I wasn’t going to go out without a fucking fight.

As I stood, heart pumping, adrenaline racing through my body, ready for whatever was about to happen, I realized my attacker was running away. And then I realized he had my super cool jacket in his hand. I let out a weird, uneasy laugh as I thought to myself, “Dammit, that was supposed to last me for a while.”

My thoughts started to clear, and I turned to see my friends were twenty feet or so behind me, backs up against a fence, knives to their bellies, and four dudes taking everything from their pockets. I was still filled with rage and I began to run towards them, but the attackers had gotten their fill and were on the run right away.

Both being nurses, Chris and I immediately checked each other and Paul for stab wounds or lacerations. We thought in all the chaos at least one of us had been hurt. But nothing was found, and as our breathing slowed, we realized we had amazingly made it through this in one piece! No trauma surgery or sutures needed….only lost material possessions and bruised egos.

Afterwards…

We headed back to the hostel and shared our story with everyone around. Everyone there was now on alert, and we even found several other people who had experienced similar events in the days before.

Our first thoughts when we were back safely in the hostel went to canceling stolen credit cards and notifying phone companies of the theft. We then went across the street to a small police post and found out where to make a police report. (Side note: travel insurance almost always requires a police report for stolen goods, make sure you get one) They told us we’d have to wait until morning to file a report but they’d take us around in their truck and look for the culprits. All still being pissed about what had happened, we jumped in the truck with a few young cops and rode around eyes peeled. We knew we wouldn’t find them, they were long gone with their score, but it felt good to look! One of the cops even said, if you see them, we’ll grab them and you can use my baton to beat them. To tell the truth, at the time, I think we were all game for that. But of course we never saw them, and headed back to the safety of our hostel.

We had one more day until our flight home, and Chris and I were extremely on edge. We were still so angry about what had happened. In my mind, every person that even looked at us for longer than a half second was now a potential mugger. Men, women, kids, old ladies, priests, teachers. Luckily, the rational part of our brains still worked, but your trust in other humans is shot for a bit.

Final thoughts…

I hate even using the term post-traumatic stress because what I went through was peanuts compared to some – soldiers, rape victims, domestic violence victims, and more. But I think any traumatic event causes some amount of this and it definitely took a while to work through. I’m a better, safer traveler these days because of this experience, but I still have issues in trusting people and situations on the road.

As I said earlier, muggings like this happen everywhere in the world, probably even close to where you live. I’m just sharing this post because it’s part of my travel story, just as my Trans-Siberian Railway trip or my time island-hopping in Thailand is. Don’t let stories like this keep you from visiting Colombia or any other reasonable place in the world. Stay smart, but travel on my friends!