Superheros wear fannypacks (June 25)

After a day in Darjeeling, we were relaxing in our hotel room when an uncle and cousin of Jeremy rushed in. Sylvia thought they wanted to join the "party", but instead they told us that their hotel room had just been robbed while they were out. They asked if we'd seen anyone carrying a black suitcase on our walk home from dinner. This suitcase had their passports and airline tickets for their return journey to Australia in the next two days. Anxiety levels rose as we all set out to see if there was anythign we could do to help. Durba and Jessica went out first to head to the police station, while Garrett and Sylvia hung back so Garrett could put proper clothes on. While we were walking out of the hotel, we spotted a porter walking very quickly down the hill above our hotel, with a black suitcase on his head. The timing and circumstance seemed too bizarre, so Garrett went after the guy at Sylvia's prodding (although she had originally told him to tell Durba and Jess who were heading to the police station). Garrett disappeared into the fog, yelling out "Stop...hey, stop".

--Garrett's experience--
The young lad was hurrying down the hill and not responding to any of my comments. I had to run in front of him in order to make him stop. He seemed nervous and may or may not have been pretending that he didn't understand me. I asked him who the suitcase belonged to, and he said he was carrying it for somebody in the hotel. At that point I put my hand on the suitcase and made him put it down, granted that I was twice his size, but I was still nervous because one of his hands was in his pocket and who knew what was in there. I checked the luggage tag and saw it was from Sydney, just then the guy ran away. I brought back the luggage, to find out that he had also taken a backpack with other valuables, so Jeremy, Andrew and I ran back down the hill to find the thief. When we got to the bottom a jeep made a quick u-turn and went driving down the road away from us. This concluded the unfortunate event in Darjeeling. Luckily, the suitcase with the important documents was saved, by the man with the orange fanny pack.