Colon Panama 2008. We just finished renting a sail boat in order to sail to Colombia, and we where on our way home to pack and get ready for the journey the next day. It was me, my buddy Mitch, and Max and American we had been travelling with at the time. We had been travelling together for a good 3 months by this point, so needless to say we spent the walk arguing about ridiculous shit, as we'd all seen just about enough of each other.
I don't think 5 full minutes had even passed since leaving the maria when all of a sudden a group of kids in their early 20's came out of some bushes just in front of me. Before I know what was happening I saw one guy pull up his shirt and the next thing I knew he had his gun cocked and in my face. They gestured for me to give them my bag, which staring down the barrel of a gun seemed like the right thing to do in the moment.
So I started taking off my bag as the group continued further back towards Mitch and Max. One of the guys came over to help me take off my bag (such a gentleman). As my bag was coming off and I was trying to process what was going on, I was thinking about how my life was in this bag. My passport, money, yadda yadda, basically everything I would need to get out of there.
Even though the gun was no longer in my face by this point I was still in shock. I'm not used to starring down barrels of guns in sketchy ass foreign cities, so I was to busy trying to understand the situation to be afraid. It was this kind of surreal experience like was this really happening. Now at this point in my Life, Colon Panama was by far the nastiest retch of a place I'd had the pleasure of visiting (Haiti took that record soon after), so the thought of being stuck here with nothing was not high on my list.
I decided to say fuck it and fight for my shit, since well, I really didn't have a choice. Which I did, the whole time expecting to get shot. Somehow in the moment getting shot was better than being stuck with nothing... At this point the action was all behind me and I couldn't see where the gun, or any gun may or may not be pointing. I just remember thinking "as long as it doesn't hit my spine I'm good".
Long story short, Max ended up giving them his bag, and was even nice enough to reach into his pocket and give them his wallet with cash and credit cards. They seemed happy with that and left without even touching Mitch who was holding a camera.
Now Max was a pretty tough talker and wanted to do all these risky endeavours the hole time, like hike the Darien gap. Yet in typical fashion the loudest mouth folded the quickest. Add in that earlier when taking out his share of the cash for the boat, the bank machine took the money off his account and didn't give him any cash. So its fair to say Max wasn't having a good day.
Me and Mitch on the other hand were stoked about the whole ordeal. We kind of live for this shit so of course we were ecstatic...Max not so much.
A couple weeks later I was reading in a paper about a couple from Quebec who where riding a bus in Honduras when some armed men came on demanding everyone's wallets. The boyfriend refused and they shot him in the face killing him instantly...So you never know.
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I don't know if your asking this as a way to scare yourself out of travelling, but I just need to say in all my years both here and abroad I have almost never been in any danger I didn't go looking for. The world is a much safer places than people are led to believe.
