Alexander Johnston parachuting on his gap year travels
It began with a phone call from Lima in South America. “Dad, I’ve been
mugged.”
Our son, like thousands of others of his age, is on a gap-year rite-of-passage
trip around the world and had pitched up with two friends in the notoriously
felonious Peruvian capital. We had told him that the places you are most
likely to get robbed were the streets closest to the hotels and hostels
where foreign tourists stay, yet they are also the easiest places for your
guard to drop; and so it proved.
Returning in the small hours to his backpackers’ hostel, Alexander was
approached by two men and mugged at knifepoint. On his person he had,
somewhat stupidly as he would later admit, all three banks cards that he had
taken with him for the trip: a credit card and two debit cards from
different banks. The robbers took the lot, along with about £30 in cash.
Alexander was unharmed, if shaken, and a miserable sounding voice was soon
on the other end of the phone asking for help.
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The first thing to do, of course, was to cancel the cards. That was the easy
bit. I rang the three banks straight away and the cards were consigned to
oblivion within an hour of the robbery. The thieves probably could not have
cared less since they did not have the personal identification numbers
(PINs) in any case. They were only after the cash.
Youngsters on their travels are advised to leave their cards in a safe place
if possible and carry small amounts of cash that can be handed over if they
are robbed. There are horror stories of gap-year travellers being abducted
and frogmarched to every cashpoint in the city until they are drained of all
funds.
Alexander was luckier than most in that he was unharmed and lost a relatively
small amount of money. But …
Read the original article at Telegraph
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