Negotiating myself out of a mugging in Argentina

by Joshua Elder (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

Making a local connection Argentina

As a gringo travelling South America, if possible, it's good to try to maintain a fairly discreet profile. So, at almost a foot taller than the average local person, bright blonde hair after 6 months in the Mendoza sun and my 18-year old baby face I wasn’t off to much of a good start as I prepared to hit the road. But what I did have was my Spanish. During my 6 months in Argentina, I’d managed to learn it to a pretty fluent level, as well as pick up the ‘Mendocino’ accent and slang/street vocabulary. So wherever I went although I looked gringo, I sounded 'Argy' (which has its pros and cons with the surrounding nations). So this is the first point on why learning Spanish can be beneficial as the locals will respect you more for it and it helps you blend in. The next reason you should learn Spanish is to save yourself from getting mugged at the back of a night bus. Now before I tell this story I want to say that I brought the situation entirely upon myself through naivety and the truth is something like this could happen anywhere in the world. I often worked the late afternoon-evening shift at the hostel which occasionally, would mean having to stay up quite late to check-in travellers arriving at all sorts of times. This particular evening I got paid from work (in cash) and also decided to withdraw a load more from the cashpoint. The reason being the cash machine would charge a certain fee every time I withdrew money, so I would always take out large amounts at a time. A great thing about Mendoza was that that they ran bus services almost all night long so I could always catch the bus from the city centre where the hostel was to home about an hours' journey south to a town called Vistalba in Lujan de Cuyo. This particular night it must have been about 2-3am when I caught the bus. The first mistake I made was sitting all but a few rows from the back. The next was deciding to listen to music with Apple earphones. About half-way into the journey a young guy in his 20s got on the bus with who was probably his girlfriend, and they decided to sit behind me on the back row. The next thing I know he’s decided to sit right behind me and he starts to talk to me. He wanted my earphones. This was just a few weeks before I had decided I was going to go backpacking up the continent, so I really didn’t want to hand over my earphones because I was aware of some of the lengthy bus journeys I was going to be taking (up to 18 hours) and not being able to listen to music would be hell. At this point it’s safe to say I was absolutely shitting myself. It was pitch black, there was nobody else on the bus, I was carrying a load of cash and this guy was intimidating as f*** with his hand in his back pocket, so I didn’t know what he might have been carrying. I asked him to just leave me alone, but he wouldn’t budge. I then thought I’d test my luck by negotiating with him. So I said ‘if I give you some money will you leave me alone’ sort of thing, and he agreed to it. I reached slowly into my wallet doing my best to keep it out of his sight and pulled out one $100 peso note, the equivalent to £5 at the time. He took it from me and went to sit back with his girlfriend. As he got off the bus, he shook hands with me and said “muchas gracias”, and not in an intimidating or patronising way but in a way that felt genuine, that I’d really helped him out. As my heart rate slowly began to come down from the ceiling I knew I’d learnt my lesson. Always carry enough cash to negotiate with potential muggers and know enough Spanish to get yourself the best deal possible.