A little over 7 years ago, on 28 February, 2014 Ginny and I arrived in Buenos Aires with our close friends, Anne and Don Wood. We had just disembarked from a cruise around South America and had a couple of days before Ginny and I headed back to Singapore and the Woods to the Bahamas where their elder son and his family lived.
We stayed at the Sheraton Hotel on the corner of Avenue Leandro N Alem and Avenue San Martin – see map below
The morning after we arrived we decided to go shopping as the girls wanted to buy steak knives for which apparently Argentina is famous. At this point I have to admit I was extremely foolish as we were strongly advised by the hotel not to wear watches or any jewellery when we went out, as mugging is (or was at that time) common in Buenos Aires. However, having spent a lot of my life in somewhat risky parts of Asia, I figured that advice was not for experienced travellers like me. I also thought, as I was wearing a long sleeve shirt with my watch covered most of the time, I would be safe. How wrong could I have been?
We crossed the road in front of the hotel and walked up Avenue San Martin with the Plaza General San Martin on our right. After a couple hundred meters we headed off the the left into a shopping area with some pedestrian areas. At one point Don and I thought we would support a local shoe shine man and chatted to him as he cleaned our shoes. Anne and Ginny eventually found a shop with the steak knives they wanted and Don and I left them to do the negotiation. Don and I walked back to Avenue San Martin and walked down through the Plaza Gen San Martin park back to the corner of Avenue del Libertador and Avenue San Martin. Here we waited for the pedestrian lights so we could walk across to the South Eastern side of Avenue Leanardro N. Alem directly opposite the hotel.
As I stepped up onto the pavement I felt myself falling slowly to the ground. My first thought was that I must have had a heart attack and then I thought Don must be playing a trick on me by tackling me to the ground. But I realised Don would never do that. And then I felt a body slide over the top of me and heard people starting to scream. I realised I was being mugged. The mugger jumped up and put his fingers under the metal band of my watch and starting pulling me along the ground hoping that my watch band would snap. It didn’t. As more and more female bystanders started screaming and, as the band had not snapped, the mugger ran away.
Whilst I was a little shaken I was fine. Don and I decided we should find the girls and warn them to be very careful. We found them a couple of hundred meters up Avenue San Martin. We all proceeded down the side of the street opposite the park and then crossed over the pedestrian crossing on the left in the above photo to be just outside the hotel – see photo (the entrance has changed a little since we were there).
Don and I were walking a few steps in front of Anne and Ginny and were meters from the hotel entrance when I heard Ginny scream “Peteeeeeeee”. I turned and saw the same mugger sprinting towards me. As he went to crash tackle me to the ground, I bent over at that instant resulting in him going over my head and falling to the ground. He jumped up, looked at me and then at the hotel entrance, possibly worried about hotel security, and then ran down to Avenue Leanardro N. Alem where he had a motor bike waiting on the wrong side of the road. He jumped onto the back and they took off. I realised I had had a very lucky escape. I took my watch off that day and have virtually not worn it since.
Reflecting over what happened, as my watch was not visible when I was walking, I am convinced that the person cleaning my shoes must have seen my watch from under my cuff and passed on the information to the mugger. When I returned to Singapore I had the watch serviced to check the band and they told me that the mugger would have known everything about my watch from his first failed mugging which is why he returned for a second attempt. I was surprised to learn that in watch terms my watch was an antique as I had purchased it over 30 years ago.
I realised how lucky I was when Ginny and I heard on the news a week later that an Australian had been shot to death for his camera in Buenos Aires. It was a stupid mistake on my part to wear my watch and for which I might well have paid with my life.
Peter Church blog 