What could this post be about? Hint: it’s probably in your pocket or in your hand right now.
You bring it to work, to bed, to the bathroom, and no it’s not your miniature chihuahua. (Unless you’re Becca and it is currently living in a drawer in the kitchen. The… not the chihuahua. Rex is fine, guys, I promise)
Does this story involve a missing… cellular device?
I don’t like your thinking, vetoed. Please guess something a bit less dramatic. Sorry, a missing phone? Why would you wish that upon me?
Alright, let me take you back to one of my less proud moments as a solo traveler. Location: Medellin, Colombia. Time: evening, sometime in December of 2023:
Wow, this bag is really in my way when I’m dancing, let me take it off. Last week that was fine, right?
You’re trying to tell me that it is probably a bad idea. You’re rooting for me (hopefully).
In that moment, I conveniently forgot that at last week’s dance class, I had left my things hidden under a sweater closer to the pile of other people’s belongings. Safety in numbers, right? This time, logic goes out the window as I rejoin the dancefloor with the bag haphazardly placed near the others in the middle of a park in the city. Exposed.
Recipe for disaster… I had set myself up for the perfect, simple crime. But don’t pass all your judgement on me yet. For the past weeks, dancing the nights away and eating well to pass the days with flavor became my version of “settled” in Medellin. I became really comfortable with the situations I was involving myself in: going to dance classes and meetups alone, arriving on motorcycle pickup apps like Uber to meet my new friends there. After frequently being on high alert through my travels, it was so relieving to be truly at ease somewhere. Medellin earned the spot as the second city (in my whole life) that I thought I could move to and live in for upwards of a year.
Back in the park, I find a partner and enjoy the next dance, yet have a weird feeling after the song ends. I glance over to check the area I left my bag, coming up empty: Wait, is that the spot I left my fanny pack? Where is it? My (smallest, most useful possession) is in there!
Well.. maybe this comfort had me a bit too relaxed.
What she lost, revealed
Yeah, you guessed it, it was my phone. Now, was this foresight, or did your predictions today change the course of events back on this night in 2023? If you had guessed I was talking about a pocket knife, would my phone have been saved?
Or, perhaps, did my preparations for the evening, on the day of the crime, change the outcome?
Just before leaving, I had removed my credit card from the bag, “just in case.” Did I somehow predict this? Had I become complicit by taking away the barriers to leave my bag in a vulnerable position?
The five year old phone… sometimes I forgot its standing as my smallest, most useful possession. Although it had been a lovely companion over the past years, it did not quite hold the same value as it did right out of the box. The credit card? With no international fees and plenty of ATM issues this trip, I knew its value.
Is it gone forever?
A hunt for the missing device quickly ensued, which involved helpful people trying to ask questions, offer their phones for me to use Find My iPhone (I couldn’t remember my login), and remind me “no dar papaya,” (as if I could think of anything else at the moment).
No dar papaya is a common saying in Colombia, literally translated to “don’t give papaya,” reminding you to avoid becoming an easy target for crime by not flashing expensive items (jewelry, phone) or leaving belongings unattended. If you take the saying to heart, it is less likely that bad things will happen to you. Up until this point in my trip, I had not personally experienced petty theft, causing a feeling of invincibility that allowed my proactive behavior to slip. The idea that my actions in this situation caused me to “give papaya” made me frustrated: I should have known better.
There were some police officers stationed nearby, to whom I started to talk to and explained the situation. Although in crisis mode myself, I was able to communicate well in Spanish and receive the expected answer of “haha what can we do?” Once the papaya has been given (by you) and received (by the other party), what more is there to do than say your goodbyes to the departed item?
To wind down and distract ourselves in the aftermath, a friend and I walked around the park and indulged in some much needed late night snacks at the park before I went home. When I arrived at the hostel, I blurted out that I lost my phone at the dance event. My friends almost didn’t believe me at first, but when tears threatened my eyes at having to explain myself, they turned to caring mode.
Nothing like an easy to follow diagram to help me conceptualize the next day without panicking:
Flow chart, found in my journal the night of ~*the crime~:
- Block phone number
- Find my iPhone
- Go to location with police
- Find phone → unblock phone
- Don’t find phone → buy new phone
Calling in Backup
Normally, I like to leave my family out of the loop on the bad or potentially dangerous things that may or may not happen to me while away, at least until I am safe or have managed the situation. Something like this, however, requires backup. All my passwords were saved on my phone; in all likelihood, they would sell it for parts rather than go hunting for my passwords. But what did that mean for me? I didn’t know any of them by heart, and was having problems accessing my accounts. My email? No. My bank? Not confident. My Spotify? Nope. My Apple ID? We already saw that I didn’t. What about Instagram? Oh, thank god yes.
As for the rest of my passwords, I knew they were recorded in a journal in my childhood bedroom. Necessary step: tell my parents what’s going on. I texted my dad on someone else’s WhatsApp to let him know that my phone has been misplaced, telling him the story in a voice message so he knows it’s me. (My mom would never open a message from an unknown number, so I tried elsewhere) Little did I know, he is also aware of scammers and did not believe it’s me right away, not even clicking on the message to hear my voice. If I wasn’t able to log into Instagram and message my sister, who validated my story to him, it would have been much harder to get in contact and receive any support.
Using Instagram also to reach my friends who had access to my phone’s current location, they told me the whereabouts had not been updated since before the phone was taken. Frustrated at the inaccuracy of Apple’s acclaimed “find my iPhone,” I set up a call with Apple to see if there was anything else I could do. Somehow, the only available tenants (since calling from Colombia) were Spanish speaking. Yes, I speak Spanish, but not to the level needed to defend myself and ask the questions I thought relevant for the situation. Think: being grilled about specific settings and technology questions that would be hard for me even in English.
“I’m on the phone w/Apple in Spanish & his questions are killing me, makes me feel incompetent LOL”
-journal entry, day after ~*the crime~
In the end, the call led to nothing other than the admission that my phone was lost to the abyss. No more step 3 (go to location with police). The worst was over now that I had no self-imposed time limit to scour any and all available resources to get it back. I was surprisingly calm, my anxiety subsiding as I reached the acceptance of my actions that brought me here.
Why is the phone the smallest, most useful possession?
With this new mindset, I could think about what losing my phone really meant and how I would continue my journey. My phone, as the only device with access to wifi, was used for… literally everything. Let’s take a look at the many hats the phone wore while traveling.
The daily questions
- Where am I? (Maps)
- How can I get there? (Uber)
- Where will I sleep tonight? (Booking hostels)
- Where am I going next? What should I do while I’m here? (Google)
- How much does that cost? (Calculator / Currency converter)
- How can I remember this moment? (Notes / Camera)
- What time is it? When will I wake up? (Watch / Alarm)
Staying in touch back home
- How are my friends and family? (Phone)
- What day is it? Whose birthday is coming up? (Calendar events)
The miscellaneous, but equally important features
- How will I find my bed in the dark hostel room?? (Flashlight — Taschenlampe)
- How can I wind down? (TV, music, book; meditation guidance)
My grand idea from college of getting a flip phone came to mind, but was squashed immediately upon the realization of this list. Although I may have anti-tech ideologies, I wouldn’t have made it a week without all those features after having been dependent on them for months, even years. Especially alone in another country.
Once I bought a new smartphone ($110, cheapest I could find with a halfway decent camera) and did all the necessary admin such as reestablishing my accounts, the only thing left to do was continue my trip, hoping and praying every so often that my photos and notes did in fact get backed up to the cloud. It would be such a shame to lose weeks or months of memories in that way.
I slowly but surely learned the ins and outs of the new phone, enjoying new-to-me Android features like the lock screen pattern password, special widgets, dual clocks for displaying multiple time zones, and the fact that I wasn’t quite as addicted to it. The new characteristics and qualities were fine, but I did miss the familiarity of the iPhone 8 that had lived in my hand for the past 5 years through college and the start of my solo traveling journey.
The grand reveal (& loss)
My biggest fear around losing a phone generally comes down to memories being lost, in the form of photos or other mementos.
When I was eventually able to log onto iCloud, I found my photos safe from destruction and my notes intact. Phew! The unfortunate news is that my voice memos were nowhere to be found.
I utilize the voice recordings on my phone to journal when I am too excited, upset, or tired to write, resulting in the highest highs and lowest lows being captured with emotion on audio. There were a few of my favorite personal stories that I retold in audio so I wouldn’t forget the details in the future. The voice memos went back five years, all the way to high school Spanish practice, none of which were saved elsewhere.
It still frustrates me when I consider losing access to these memories, mostly because I could have prevented it by ensuring that they were saved off the phone.
There’s one particular voice memo that I wish back. I was in Montanita, Ecuador learning to surf. My energy is so high, I’m sharing the joy of standing up on the board for the first time, catching a wave on my own, and making friends with other surfers. Pure happiness. I would listen to this memo when I needed a reminder of just how amazing solo traveling can be. Now, it is gone, and sometimes it still makes me sad that I lost the live narration. But if that is the worst part of the whole losing my phone story, the only lasting impact, I can live with that. I know it existed once, and that will have to do.
Thanks for reading, see you next week!
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