Last night I received word from Jeanine that my younger brother, Mark, suffered a stroke.  Fortunately, he was immediately treated with TPA which cleared the clot. Initial reports indicate that he suffered no physical impairments although he is having some issues with speech and memory. With little I can do from Costa Rica, I choose to believe he will make a complete recovery. I know his amazing wife and kids will do everything humanly possible to make that happen as will our entire extended family.

Perhaps my mind was preoccupied with concerns over my brother or maybe it was my high regard for the friendliness of the Costa Rican people but I let my guard down today and it cost me dearly. While continuing to make my way down the Pacific coast towards Quepos, where I thought I would make a brief visit to the Manuel Antonio National Park, I fell victim to a well honed criminal enterprise that liberated me of $10K worth of camera gear. Worst of all, I lost 90% of the photographs I had captured since arriving in the country which has left me more depressed than I can describe.

I was able to reverse engineer the crime based on all the evidence I discovered after the fact. The theft was perpetrated by a three man crew that targeted me at some point during my travels when they observed me taking photos with my high end gear. They followed me in their car until I stopped again. One of them then stabbed my driver’s side rear tire with a small Exacto blade (see photo above of the actual blade). They then continued to follow me until my tire eventually went flat. When it did, they drove a few hundred meters past me where the driver let the other two out. One of them came walking by nonchalantly and offered to help me change the tire. I was doing fine by myself but he was very insistent and I did not want to be rude. He spoke no English and we struggled to communicate. While I was jacking the car up, he was removing the spare tire from the back hatch of the 4×4 rental.  He was making a lot of noise and banging the car around a lot. He did this to distract me as the second guy snuck around and approached the passenger side front door where he quietly gathered two of my three cameras and walked away. Once he made it back to their car the guy that was helping me just walked away and down the road to join his buddies. I did not even notice the cameras were gone until I was ready to start driving again. The reason I know all this is because the whole thing was caught on a security video from a store across the street and the guy who repaired the damaged tire gave me the Exacto blade.

I spent the next several hours with the police before making my way back into the mountains to my next destination in the cloud forest of San Geraldo de Dota.   Fortunately my camera equipment is well insured and the thieves had no appetite for my low cost travel camera leaving me something to continue shooting with.