A traveller's tale from India - Grand larceny 1993

Apart from being sick or suffering an injury, the worst thing can happen to you when you are on holiday or travelling is being victim of theft. Too many vacations are ruined because a handbag has mysteriously disappeared or, in some unlucky cases, when the threat of violence has been used to rob people of their belongings.

I have been relatively fortunate over the years. I did have my bag snatched in Southern India one year but there was no threat of violence. I also had the misfortune to fall for a classic money changing scam in 1989. I changed money on the black market in Budapest but instead of getting the good rate for my dollars that I had hoped for, I was given worthless notes from a different currency in return. Generally speaking though, I have been quite lucky. On two occasions, once in Harare, Zimbabwe and on another occasion in Santiago, Chile, I narrowly avoided being mugged. They would almost certainly have resulted in some form of physical injury to myself but on both occasions I was suspicious enough to notice the men who were following me and narrowly managed to escape both times by running into the middle of the road and flagging down a taxi. I also almost fell victim to a clever pick pocket in the Sri Lankan town of Galle once. One person subtly pushed me towards the wall so that his partner, who was travelling in the opposite direction, would have to squeeze pass me through the small gap that was left. I felt a hand in my pocket and the pickpocket would have succeeded but unluckily for him, I don’t ever keep things in my pockets. Nevertheless, it was still quite irritating.

However, my most annoying experience of theft was also coincidentally on the Indian subcontinent. I was in Agra for the same reason as every tourist who goes there, to see the ‘Taj’. It had been a trying day. I had gotten off the night train from Udaipur early in the morning and within a few minutes of arriving in this rather unpleasant Indian city, a man tried to run off with my rucksack. Fortunately it was chained to a post so it was actually quite a comical attempt at larceny. I was less amused later in the day when a rickshaw driver took me to a jeweler's shop where three overweight and overly-moustached men (straight from the set of a bollywood gangster movie) tried to involve me in a gem smuggling scam. I managed to avoid handing over my credit card details with an innocent smile and a few white lies, I may even have complimented them on their well kept 'taches'. Fortunately, they were only interested in an easy scam not robbery and I was allowed to leave unmollested. I found the whole experience rather disconcerting at the time but on balance this was not my most annoying experience of that day.


Later that day, I found a rooftop restaurant which overlooked the Taj Mahal. It was a small establishment and I was alone on the roof, or so I thought. I ordered an ice cold beer and treated myself to chicken tikka with naan bread. When it arrived, I carefully stripped the chicken from its bones. I made an incision in the Naan bread to create a pocket and I filled it with onion, the filleted chicken and a thick raita. A cold beer, a gourmet sandwich and a spectacular sunset. As I took the first bite of my sandwich the stress of the day melted away. It was a moment of paradise for a food lover like myself.


Unfortunately, it really was just a moment. A second after I had bit into my patiently constructed sandwich a hairy body landed on my table. It seemed to thrust its pink bottom towards my face. It then ripped the sandwich from my grasp and sent my cold beer crashing to the floor as it jumped and landed a few feet away.

The monkey (a rhesus macaque, I learned later) then had the arrogance to look me squarely in the eye mocking me and continued to munch away upon my chicken tikka sandwich until nothing was left.