After a 12 hour buss ride from Belem, I arrived in Sao Luis. I only stayed a couple of days because I didn’t want to make the trip to Fortaleza in one bus trip. Another 15 hours by bus later I came to Fortaleza. I have been in Fortaleza once before, a few years ago, but coming in by bus instead of by airplane, I didn’t recognize a thing. I realized how big this city really is. Only when I came to Beira Mar and Iracema Beach I saw a lot of familiar places. It was high season and the first 4 days I had to change hotels every night because they were booked out. The second hotel (
Hotel Casa Blanca) was a very good deal; I even had high speed Internet access in my room for a very reasonable price. As my 4th and final hotel I landed in Hotel Litoral (a small hotel, more like a Pousada). It surely wasn’t a good deal, but I was tired of changing hotels every night.
Now of course I wish I would have kept on going because on Sunday when I came home from the beach, the key was not in the reception, the door to my room wasn’t locked and when I entered, it hit me: My laptop disappeared from the table, my bag, which I always keep locked was ripped open, all my money gone including credit card, bank card, ID card, MP3 player and more. Fortunately they weren’t interested or didn’t find my backup disks with pictures of my trip and source code that I wrote during that time. Still they left me with only about 10sFr of cache. I had to be very patient, make lots of phone calls and spend a day very hungry until I received in a local bank the emergency money from Visa. For me it was clear that I had to return to Switzerland now because of the complex installation that was on my computer. It would have been hard to find a suitable notebook in Brazil and very difficult to get to all the software that I needed. To buy a ticked home I needed another credit card. As it happens when something goes wrong, it hardly ever comes alone. Thanks to a misunderstanding I didn’t get an emergency card (which you can get within 48 hours), but a normal card and I had to wait a whole week for it with my emergency money uncomfortably running out slowly, not knowing when the new card will come.
The police didn’t find out much. When they came to the hotel, they found the key to my room in another one. According to the hotel, two men with foreign accent checked into that room, paid for one night, but then left again on the same day and never came back. As for me I am not so sure about that story since only and exactly my room was cleared out. For me it looks like there was an insider giving out the information. I don’t trust the hotel, especially since I wasn’t allowed to call the police from within the hotel. I made it clear that I will not pay for my stay in the hotel since for me it was negligent behavior of the hotel, allowing a key to disappear from the reception.I had some bad luck in Fortaleza, but still it’s a nice city with a beautiful beach, Praja do Futuro, and a long busy promenade.
