Short Story: Tracking Down Jens’ AirPods in a Small Village Villavieja

Something unbelievable happened today. We were packing our backpacks as it was time to leave Tatacoa Desert and travel to Bogota. It was only 40 minutes until our bus would leave when Jens said that he cannot find his AirPods (it is so annoying that he always realizes that something is missing just when we have to leave). We unpacked all the bags again and searched every corner of the room but, unfortunately, he was right – the AirPods were nowhere to be found.

We checked the Find My app to see where the AirPods were last seen. The good news was, that the last signal had been recorded last night in the village we were. The not so good news was that the connection was recorded at a time we were already asleep and the location was somewhere we had never been.

Jens had already lost hope, but Laura convinced him to just walk to the place and ask around. Maybe it was the bus driver who had taken the AirPods with him to his home. Luckily we had not booked the bus tickets yet so we were a bit flexible with time.

So we were walking along the street to the location where the headphones had been last seen until the app sent a notification that it has a connection to the AirPods! There were some regular houses there and a car workshop where we saw some men. As we still cannot really speak Spanish, we typed our request in the Google Translate application and approached the guys. The text said something about giving lost our airphones and we believe we had left them in the bus. As one of the men was reading the message a big smile appeared in his face. He nodded and said what we think means something like he had found them in the bus as he was cleaning it. He left to the back of the workshop and returned in a minute with a small bag where Jens’ AirPods and ear plugs were in. It is just incredible what the technology nowadays is capable of! Of course you still need a bit of luck as it also could have been some gangsters who took it and who would not be friendly to give the items back.

One question remains though… Who was more surprised – us, to be really able track down the AirPods on the other side of the village, or the man, who suddenly (three days later after finding the bag) had two tourists in his workshop asking for the things?