Lost phone

One of the truths about traveling is that sooner or later sh#t will happen.

As you go about from one place to another, your body gets tired and your mind becomes dull from the constant stimulation. It is a perfect recipe for things to go wrong and on the evening we drove back to Sofia from Bansko, we dropped the ball.

Well, to be fair, we did not actually drop anything but after leaving the bus and when getting ready to buy bus tickets to go to Istanbul we noticed that A's phone was missing.

The realization that she might be (for a while) electronically disconnected from the world and separated from all of the pictures which we had taken was grim. I mean, we were in a foreign country where we do not speak the language, where they hardly speak any English and where they do not even use the same alphabet... This was compounded by the fact that it was now dark and that we wanted to leave to Turkey in a few hours which would not allow for us to do much to retrieve the phone without having to stay at least an extra day in Bulgaria. Ah yes, and this was on the evening of the 30th of December and if we postponed the bus ride we would also probably miss out on the Istanbul New Year's which we had planned.

We were definitely nervous!

After searching our stuff 20 times in a mild moment of panic, we were now sure that we did not have it and had no idea if she either left it on the bus or if it fell off while repacking and someone nicked it.

Since there was no phone on the floor next to the area we repacked in and there was no way to catch a potential thief, we hoped that she had left the phone on the bus and decided to track the bus that took us there and search it as we knew that Sofia was its last stop.

Immediately we started running around the semi lit parking lot trying to find our bus but we were definitely out of luck. The bus was gone and we needed to try something else.

Surely the people at the ticket stand would help us contact the bus driver!

Well, to our disappointment, and in what was undoubtedly one of the least pleasant surprises of our trip, probably because of the language barrier, the ladies at the ticket stand where in no way inclined to help us beyond giving us a general contact number to the bus company, which, after several phone calls, turned out to not be able to help beyond telling us to contact them again the next morning. It did not look too great.

Not satisfied with the situation, even though another friendly bus driver did try to give us a hand, we decided to take a shot at getting a taxi to where we suspected the bus had been parked for the night. Note that I say "suspected" as this is clearly not one of the easiest things to find in Google...

Approached by a taxi driver who did seem to speak a little bit of English, we asked him if he knew the way to that bus company's parking lot and to our great fortune he said he could probably help!

With a great sense of anticipation we hopped on the taxi and after about 15m driving, we got there. We found the parking lot! Which by the way was not where we thought it would be...

She quickly rushed out of the taxi and attempted to retrieve her property while I stayed put waiting. From the car I could see her go through the poorly lit lot talking to a lot of people, I could see her enter one of the buildings and, after what seemed like an eternity, she still wasn't coming out. Admittedly at this point I was somewhat nervous as I knew that she had to do all of this resorting to broken Russian and Google translator (on my phone) in order to get her message across, so I knew it was a nerve racking experience for her for sure.

It was at this point that an unlikely savior entered the scene: our taxi driver.

Frustrated as he saw her come outside the building but still not having any solution, he joined the conversation and helped ease the communication. Suddenly he is making phone calls left and right trying to talk so someone who might help. On an unexpected turn of events, the bus driver that had previously tried to help us at the station was in the same parking lot and through him we managed to get the phone number to the bus driver who had driven us into Sofia. Our luck seemed to be changing but the night wasn't over just yet and through all of this we really had no idea if the phone had been stolen or was in the bus.

Through our taxi driver we found out that the driver of the bus that brought us into town was already home and confirmed to us that his bus was parked in an entirely different part of town and that the he had the keys to the bus with him. The problem was that he had already had a beer and that we had to drive to pick him up at his place so we could all go to the bus together.

At that point, for getting us to that phone, we would have loved to be the ones buying him that beer, so off we went and picked him up in the most Soviet looking neighborhood in Sofia and drove on to yet another bus stop God knows where in Sofia at 21:00.

As A walked down yet another bus lot, I was ripe with anticipation and slowly getting concerned about just how huge our taxi bill would get if we had to go anywhere else....Sure enough, after a few moments of anticipation as A and our new friend the bus driver walked back from the parked bus, there it was. Her phone right where she left it in her seat!

It took us 2 hours, dozens of phone calls, picking up a stranger in the night and trusting another to drive us to a semi-unknown place while interacting in a language foreign to all parties involved but at the end of the day we had the phone back and were breathing a sigh of relief that we did all of this in time to catch our bus to Istanbul.

We all known how much we depend on our little electronic friends to help us with our daily lives but it isn't until you are faced with electronic disappearance while in a different country that you realize just how much you need your phone, the internet and the inter-connectivity it provides to effectively navigate the world.

On that night we definitely got lucky but it could have gone much worse in a multitude of ways.

So, if there is one thing we have learned from the entire experience it was to always make sure to duplicate any and all important document you may have on your phone. You never know what can happen and at how much of an inconvenient moment it may go down.

Oh yeah, and always check your pockets when you leave a bus. Boy it would have really sucked if after all of this it had been nicked in the first place!