Where's me camera?......

David's (Authorblog) Weekend Wandering question this week is

What was your worst camera nightmare?

If you would like to join in here is what David would like you to do:

Please answer today's question on your own blog, any time until next weekend. Just link to this blog (or to this post) so I can follow the progress of the discussion.

In 1989 we went to Kusadasi in Turkey, with some friends, for a holiday. We were lucky and found an extremely friendly and helpful taxi driver who adopted us and would turn up at our apartment virtually every day, whether we’d booked him or not, to see if we needed transporting anywhere.

We booked him to take us to a particular place during the second week of our holiday, then the evening before we were due to go he came to apologise saying that he wouldn’t be able to take us as something had cropped up, but he was sending another driver who he assured us would look after us.

The new driver, a nice young man, turned up on time and took us to our destination, unfortunately it was only as he drove away that our friend discovered he’d left his camera on the dashboard of the taxi. We tried signalling and shouting but he didn’t hear us.

The following day we were in town shopping and spotted the young taxi driver from the previous evening standing with his car at the taxi rank. We headed over to him and asked about the camera but he didn’t speak English very well and gestured that he didn’t understand what we were saying. One of the older drivers, who could speak English, asked us what the problem was then starting speaking to the young driver in Turkish. Quite quickly two other drivers joined in the onslaught on the young driver until eventually he was in tears! Our friend asked what was going on and the older driver explained he had told the younger one that he must pay for the camera as it had been left in his taxi so it was his responsibility! The older driver explained to us that the younger one hadn’t noticed the camera in his car, so it had possibly been picked up by another fare. However, he said that didn’t alter the fact that the younger driver was responsible for the loss and must pay. Obviously he didn’t have that kind of money and our friend told them that it was OK he would claim it off his insurance, but it took a lot of persuading before they would let the young man go and we were convinced they were ready to lynch the poor boy. Thankfully the older drivers let the young one go by which time we were sorry we’d bothered to mention the camera at all!

The following day our ‘friendly’ driver stopped by at out apartment and was mortified that the one time he hadn’t been there for us we had lost something so valuable, he offered to pay for it out of his own pocket but of course we assured him that wasn’t necessary and thanked him for his offer.

That was our first holiday in Turkey but, because of the honesty and kindness of the people, we have spent many holidays in various resorts since the ‘worst camera nightmare’ scenario.