When things go wrong....then get mostly sorted out again

On Friday we returned to our hotel to find that a money belt containing both our passports, three bank cards and 190 pounds had been stolen from our locked room. We had put it under the pillow so it was out of sight - we wouldn't have left it there it all if we had realised the hotel had maid service.Admittedly we perhaps shouldn't have left anything valuable in the room under any circumstances, a lesson we've now learned to our cost. The room had been cleaned and since nobody else could have had access to the room it was pretty obviously one or both of the maids who were responsible. (The hotel, by the way, was the Royal Pake Hotel on Route 13 in Pakse, Laos. Do yourself a favour and don't stay there.) The manager was helpful to a point but accused us of leaving a window open, which is not possible as we confirmed all the windows were locked from the inside when we discovered the theft.

We spent most of Saturday involved in increasingly Kafkaesque dealings with the local police force - it took three hours to track down a police officer who would speak to us and even after doing that they couldn't give us a police report.

Today we tried to take our minds off the whole thing by gping on a day trip. When we returned to the hotel in the evening the manager had somehow obtained our passports, although he refused to tell us exactly how. We checked out straight away and we're planning to carry on with our original route tomorrow. The whole experience has been upsetting and  frustrating, but we're both just so relieved to have our passports back - the cash is annoying but getting replacement passports would have been expensive and incovenient.

I'll update soon with a more positive post on the fun things we've done recently, going to have a cocktail now on the rooftop bar of our nice new hotel!