This morning at 6am when I was sending Jia Ling to the taxi stand, there was a dodgy looking guy standing outside our hostel. Jia Ling remarked to me, "There's a dodgy-looking guy outside our hostel," and I was like, "How do you know he's dodgy?"
Turns out that Jia Ling has the instincts of a watchdog in smelling crime. While I was walking out with Jia Ling, said Dodgy-Looking-Guy went into our hostel, bypassed a sleeping hostel worker and another one in the toilet, got into our dorm (me and Jia Ling were the only guests in the hostel), nicked Jia Ling's camera which was charging in the socket, my broken camera, wallet and old phone in my bag, and new phone which was on my bed.
On his way out, he met me on my way into my room (
Oh here's the dodgy looking guy! I didn't know he was working in this hostel!), nodded at the hostel manager behind me, and walked down the steps. I was in my room for 3 seconds when the hostel manager asked me if I knew that guy. Nope I didn't, I thought
he knew that guy. I saw the missing camera, and the hostel manager sped off in pursuit of the thief - to no avail. In the meanwhile I identified the rest of the missing stuff, noting in great relief that my passport was untouched and that my IC I had left back in KL, and called my dad to have my cards cancelled.
Then began the arduous process of filing a police report. I did one at a walking distance from the hostel with Alan the hostel manager, gave my account of the event to an officer who typed the report out painstakingly with two fingers. He then asked me to go to another area in Karamunsing (I think) at 9am to meet a certain Inspector Azaman.
The hostel owner, Richard, came and brought me out for an apologetic breakfast which I ate with his wife who's an avid backpacker herself. Richard, a man of Chinese ethnicity who was born in Uganda, raised in the UK (holds a UK passport as well) and is married with a local, obviously loves Sabah very much and repeatedly apologized, telling me not to be deterred from visiting again. I assured him that I wouldn't be. I mean after all things like this happen everywhere, if I were to be deterred I might as well stop travelling altogether.
At 9am we (Alan, Richard and I) went to the other police station and waited till 9:40am (9am Malaysian-civil-servant-time), when this inspector finally turned up and took down my statement (yet again). S-l-0-w-l-y. A muscular police guy listened to part of my statement and disappeared. About 30 minutes later when I was still making my statement, Mr. Muscular Policeman came back and asked me what colour my wallet was. He then pulled my blue-coloured clutch purse and a rabbit out of his tophat. Well, minus the rabbit and the tophat. But I was really amazed at the sheer speed that he managed to retrieve my purse, sans the money of course, but all my cards and documents were intact, that's a relief.
So, finally, at about 11am we reached back to the hostel, me being quite entirely exhausted because of the hectic events of the morning. Sent an email to Jia Ling to tell her about the tragic loss of her camera, which she kindly loaned to me to use because mine was broken. She's probably still blissfully ignorant of the turn of events at this moment.
Kesimpulannya - although I managed to lose 2 cameras (one broken anyway), 2 handphones and a sum of money (not all my money but big enough sum to make me wince), things could be much worse, because my documents are all intact, and by a miraculous stroke of luck we managed to have backups of all our photos! How on earth, you wonder. Well, after breaking my camera, I gave my card to Nex for him to save his pictures into my card, so my card was actually not in the camera when it was stolen. Stroke of Luck #2, Jia Ling emptied her pictures into the hostel computer to upload into Flickr and to save into her external harddisk (which did not work) and I was supposed to save them into a thumb drive borrowed from Nex, so her stolen camera was actually empty as well. And I didn't bring my laptop, thank god!
So yeah, a lesson was learnt, minus the tremendous hassle of retrieving all the important documents and the heartbreak of losing all the travel pictures. Just that I'm now much poorer, and I've lost everybody's phone contacts. Help me by emailing me your number, that would be great.
Going back to KL this evening, see you guys at home later!
I am awesome. I can do it. What is another 10,000 words? I'll write twenty if I have to. Words don't scare me. Words are my friends. Without words there'll be no languages. Without languages there'll be no meaning. Without meaning there'll be no society. Damn. Words are starting to scare me again.
