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Carné Chase
By Alison Roberts
It had taken five months of paperwork, red tape and bureaucracy for me to get my Carné de Extranjeriá (required by all foreigners resident in Peru for pretty much every transaction) and less than 24 hours to lose it.
There had been nothing unusual about my taxi journey to the gym on Saturday morning. The driver asked the standard set of Gringo questions that I had come to expect having travelled everywhere by taxi since moving to Lima. De donde eres? Te gusta Peru? Conoces Cusco? (Where are you from? Do you like Peru? Do you know Cusco?) I was ready with my now well-practiced responses and replied robotically. The radio interrupted my interrogation now and again with updates of the World Cup scores. I stared out of the window at my now familiar route - suburban condominiums and billboards of larger than life ladies with something to sell - and braced myself for the expected near misses with street kids who also had something to sell. I gave the guy the exact fare and hopped out of the cab slamming the door shut and not giving the driver or his taxi a second glance or a moment's more thought. I was late for class. I smiled and waved at the gym's security guard as always and raced towards the entrance and that's when I realized. I stopped dead in my tracks. My wallet. My Carné!
I spun around on the spot, scanned the ground and sped back to the road. No wallet. That meant only one thing - my wallet was in the taxi, the taxi that was fast disappearing out of view. I couldn't remember a word of relevant Spanish. Why hadn't I paid more attention to the 'Lost and Stolen' section of my phrase book? Instinctively I jumped up and down, whilst waving furiously at the vanishing taxi, and shrieking dollars. It seems actions do speak louder than words and the security guard translated mine to mean panic and predicament.
As if by magic one of the security cars that patrol the Lima streets appeared. The security guard flagged it down and hastily spoke with the two uniformed cops. I can only assume he told them what he thought was up with the Gringa and that he was in fact spot on with his diagnosis for within a flash I was bundled into the back seat of the cop car and was speeding off in hot pursuit of the taxi.
There was a problem however with this plan since I hadn't any recollection of the registration number of the car, the ID number of the taxi or its driver. It was just a taxi and there's nothing unusual about a taxi on the streets of Lima. Wait; there had been something unusual. It was yellow. Amarillo. Amarillo. I shouted through the iron grate that separated me the victim, not villain, from the two cops (a pair of handcuffs, dangling from the grate, rattled confirmation of this fact). Now if we had been in New York we would have had a problem but generally taxis aren't yellow in Lima. Our search had been instantly narrowed.
We raced through traffic, sounding the horn, weaving in and out of vehicles and taking corners on two wheels. I was in a real car chase! Stop the taxi. Stop the taxi, as Dastardly and Muttely would say. I felt like Dorothy but in this case it wasn't the yellow road we were following. Then in the distance up ahead I spotted a yellow taxi. The cop rammed his foot to the floor. It was all or nothing now as the taxi was fast approaching a roundabout and once swallowed into the flow we would be sure to lose it in the free for all to reach an exit.
With some spirited driving however it wasn't long before we were on the taxi's tail and forcing it to pull over. I leapt out of the car and raced over to the taxi. Yes that was my taxi driver and there in the hands of his front passenger was my wallet, open and with my Carné on display. We may have caught them red handed deciding how to divide the bounty but I'd like to think they were looking for my sparkling new ID. I kissed the passenger and the cop taking them both and myself by surprise. It could have been an adrenaline rush from the chase but it was also the only way this Gringa, who's still learning Spanish, could think of to express her gratitude, other than exclaiming milagros, milagros (miracle) over and over again.
Sat back in the cop car and behind the iron grate I had a more unusual journey back to the gym. Through a hole in the grate I passed one of the cops my Carné so he could fill in a police report on the chase. Having got my Carné back I was determined to use it!
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