Missing BlackBerry: Somewhere in Salvador de Bahia

I had my first travel mishap yesterday.

I lost my BlackBerry, somewhere in the back of a taxi.

I suppose there's nothing uniquely travel-relating about losing ones phone, but this is the first time I've ever lost a mobile phone, and it had to happen when I'm travelling around in Brazil, from where contacting my home service provider to deactivate my SIM card and my mobile device is a gigantic pain in the ass. And don't even get me started on how I was barely a year into a three-year contract.

Now I have to source a new phone that will eventually work on the Rogers network back home. I have to do that either here in Brazil where I barely speak the language, or have friends or family pick up a phone for me back in Canada, then ship it to me so that I can pick it up somewhere during my travels. And, dammit, BlackBerrys aren't exactly the cheapest things on Earth.

I suppose as mishaps go, this is really a mild one. I'm not hurt, I wasn't violently mugged, I didn't lose something really expensive, like my laptop or my dSLR.

It was the stupidest set of circumstances too. I was out in the Pelourinho District to watch a show last night and I didn't want to wear my watch because it would potentially draw too much attention to me as a potential mugging / harrassment victim. So I took along my BlackBerry to tell time -- a BlackBerry I had generally avoided carrying on my person during my trip thus far. I was also wearing the wrong pair of shorts -- the ones that didn't have particularly deep pockets.

The phone just slipped out during the cab ride back to my hostel, and I didn't notice it was gone for about two-or-three minutes, by which time the cab was long gone. All the taxis in Salvador look the same, but are actually run by dozens of different companies, so calling to find the phone proved futile.

Fortunately, I was able to get the phone deactivated through Rogers and BlackBerry customer service within two hours. I e-mailed my cousin Lemuel -- who has full access to my Rogers account since he's renting my condo -- and he was thankfully able to take care of dealing with my service provider for me.

Ten hours after losing my phone, my feelings are conflicted. Half of me is being rather zen about the situation; the other half of me wants to go out and scream and swear my fucking head off.

The worst part of this -- my contacts and info on the BlackBerry are all backed up so I didn't really lose anything except the physical device -- is that I was using my phone as an alarm clock. When you're travelling like I am, you don't need an alarm clock often, but when you do, you really do. Like this morning when I needed to be up at 6:45am to be ready in time to leave for a sailing tour.

6:45am.

One other thing I learned from this experience: The iPod Nano alarm function fucking sucks.