The Lost Wallet: A Sequel

I lost our wallet.

Again.

If you’ve been following since Malaysia you’ll know I lost our wallet once already.

Back then, it had £300 in it. There’s a highlight saved on Instagram if you don’t know the story.

The other day, Stew and I had cycled 30ish tough miles to a cafe. We went into the cafe, ordered food, ate.

I went out to grab the wallet.

It wasn’t there.

I knew instantly where it was.

Back at the cafe 15 miles behind us. I popped it on the floor or on the back of the bike as we ate a couple bananas and drank a Gatorade.

The wallet had roughly £40 and Stew’s debit card.

I knew I wasn’t going back to it. We fought against a headwind to get here and we were entering the hottest part of the day.

We were gutted.

It’s just a wallet, but it’s the wallet we’ve had since Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. We bought it at a market. It’s the wallet we once lost and reclaimed. It has memories.

Stew agreed, it’s not worth going back for.

We paid in cash. We have cash in several places.

We stayed in the cafe until they kicked us out for their siesta, then we made our way to the shop.

In my last post, I wrote how awful our days had been. This just it topped off.

This was also the night we stayed in that awful hotel.

The next morning, we got up super early and we got out of that hotel in record time.

We made tracks to the next village, we turned off the road and cycled through a very small village looking for breakfast.

I was hangry. Nothing was open.

We got back onto the main road, just 15 hungry miles until the next stop.

Stew was way ahead of me.

In the distance I could see Stew stood chatting to someone. A cyclist maybe? No, a car.

As I get closer, he’s holding something out.

Is that what I think it is?

Our wallet.

As I arrived I saw a family of four people and a woman holding our wallet!

I went through the wallet and that bad boy had been RAIDED. (Not by the people who returned it).

Someone had taken all the cash and been through every pocket and zip. They’d left the small notes, and most importantly, they’d left Stew’s debit card and the little bit of foreign currency I’d kept.

They really should’ve taken those New Zealand dollars to be honest…

I pulled out every remaining note, and more from my bike bag, and tried to give it to them, they physically recoiled.

I insisted, they insisted.

This wasn’t about money to them.

—

I can’t get over the chance of this happening.

If we hadn’t stayed in a grim hotel, we wouldn’t have been on the bike so early.

If we had found breakfast, they wouldn’t driven straight past the village and never found us while we were dining.

The wallet exchanged, I think, three hands.

1. The person that found it, took the money and handed it into the shop keeper. It was clearly raided in a rush.

2. The shop keeper, I assume, handed the wallet to the family that returned it. We didn’t tell the shop keeper where we were going, so I can only imagine the description was, “two cyclists, not from around here, heading that way…”

3. The family returned it to us.

Just wild to think about it.

Losing Stew’s debit card wouldn’t be the worst thing to deal with, but I’m so so glad we don’t have to deal with it.