by Alan Goodwin

Created on: July 29, 2009   Last Updated: July 31, 2009

Somewhere between packing our bags on our way out of the Shanghai Sofitel Hotel and unpacking them in Hong Kong, we'd somehow managed to properly lose all of our remaining collection of foreign cash resources.

I don't mean the sort of lost where the money pouch turns up after a heated discussion about financial responsibilities under a pair of flip flops at the bottom of the suitcase.

I mean the sort of lost where it's actually gone.
It's former money. Money from memory only. Ex-money.
We'd managed to collect together every article of clothing and every device that we set off from the UK with and had successfully secured them within our bags where they had remained. Except for the money.

Admittedly, since leaving home we had increased our number of accompanying suitcases by 100%, partly due to the seven chopstick gift sets, five decorative tiles, one stuffed toy panda bear, a pile of free China Daily English language newspapers, numerous badly re-folded City maps and an utterly unintelligible but pseudo novelty Chinese pamphlet about tea, but our main reason for the 2 wheeled cabin bag purchases?
The fact that the more often I had to re-pack my suitcase, the more progressively lazy I became and the careful folding and placing had quietly relaxed into chucking then lobbing and things were becoming close to stuffing.

It was probably my fault, and we down by $100 US and $500 HKD, with muttering and reluctance, I worked out that we were roughly 120GBP worse off, which just shows you how complicated exchange rate can be.

I did go to an ATM in Hong Kong to replenish spending supplies, but after my transaction was denied for the second time, we had to resort to bashing the plastic wherever possible, which is not a euphemism.
Like real life bondage enthusiasts, we were strapped for cash. Temporarily at least.

Magically, my mobile phone started ringing at 6am local time as we were waiting to board yet another flight, and answering it more through curiosity of Chinese telephone sound quality than interest in the actual caller, I was a little surprised to hear a Scottish lady from the National Westminster bank telling me that she was from the Fraud Team and it was a courtesy call to inform me that they had had to stop my card working because someone over in Hong Kong was trying to access my account.

That'd be me then.

It was all thanks to this collective demonstration of idiotic money borne drama that I made our driver in Borneo go all soft and weepy.

He'd kindly collected

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