Buses and Borders: Parts one and two of Infinity

The blog has once again fallen off, and just when we were about to actually go somewhere. Let me pick it back up.

So, we got out of Cuenca, narrowly missing a downpour with all our stuff. Once on the bus, Miriam went to sleep and I tried to distract myself from discomfort. It was already after dark, and this bus was worse than the one previous for several reasons. First, it was the sort of bus with seats that cut off my legs at the shins and also contained a bar that dug painfully into the lower vertebrae. Since this ride I have ridden on seemingly countless buses of this sort and have developed, if not techniques for making such rides more physically bearable, then at least a callous resilience and resignation toward this cheap, essential transportation. But at that point I was still green, still shocked and still not used to the sleeplessness that accompanies multi-day bus trips. Additionally, I was having trouble with the triad of windy road, abrupt accelleration and abrupt braking that seems to characterize the driving techniques of South American busmen. I was quite nauseous, and quickly popped one of the generic dramamine that Miriam's dad had been kind enough to give me on our last night in Philadelphia. I hoped very much to begin experiencing the only listed side effect: drowsiness. Finally, my personal discomfort and mental anguish were further complicated by the fact that our bus was the sort that is constantly stopping to pick up and drop off folks going only a short distance, preventing me from draping my legs over empty seats or sneaking them into the aisle to stretch my knees.
After several hours, our bus stopped, and the six or so bleary-eyed travelers still on board were ushered into a small waiting room. The temperature outdoors had shot up roughly thirty degrees farenheit during our descent from the altitude, the humidity was off the charts, and the waiting room was being kept at around freezing and was filled with processed dry air. We had no idea what was going on. We were still in Ecuador, but were changing buses for some reason. We managed to catch something like the last twenty minutes of a remade version of Flight of the Phoenix dubbed in Spanish. Surely an odd thing to behold. Miriam fell asleep again, and then our next bus, this time a double decker (the first one we had seen up to this point) with the characteristic arrangement of Semi-Cama top floor, and Cama/Super-Cama bottom floor arrived. Miriam and I managed to get seats together in the second to last row of the top floor, by prodding some tired-looking eastern-European looking fellows who were taking up two seats each. This bus, like the room that preceded it, was also kept at a temperature that was colder than any chilled beverage on the continent and as Miriam again became somnambulent I began to contemplate murdering the two children in sitting behind me whose mother seemed to find it cute that they enjoyed playing with my hair.
Eventually, things settled down until I started to feel large quantities of water pouring on me fromt he ceiling above my seat. The air conditioner was taking a very cold piss on my chest and stomach, and I moved my coat to direct as much of the water as possible toward the floor. Looking up the row, I took some comfort in seeing others in window seats on both sides of the aisle rousing, sputtering, failing to stop the flow of water out from their respective vents, and then pursuing similar drainage countermeasures to my own. This went on for what seemed like a long time, and then suddenly the lights came on. People began to stumble out of the bus, and I woke up Miriam.
For those who have not had the pleasure of waking a sleeping Miriam, let me tell you that it can be unpleasant in the best of circumstances, but when she has not slept sufficiently the process is like defrosting a block of ice that one knows to contain an angry giant. Upon being poked and nudged awake she glared up at me and said, greatly exhasperated, "What's going on? Why are you all wet?"

"It looks like we're going to Peru or something, and the air conditioner has been peeing on me. I think we're going to need our documents, but no one has said anything, and so I really have no clue." As it has since become clear, we were on the Ecuadorian side of the border crossing on the road to Tumbes. We stumbled out into the hot sticky night, passports in hand, looking dumbly around as people got into a couple of lines leading to a little building with men changing money all around it.

Miriam was not impressed. "What are we doing? Are we in line? Why aren't we in line?" A series of questions came from her tired, scrunchy face, without much hope for being answered. I, for my part, was now well into day two of sleeplessness, and had been uncomfortable and listless long enough to have entered a state of trancelike stupor. I was more or less completely lost, but also somehow deeply, serenely, unworried. People did this sort of thing every day, and most of the gringos we had met were much more obtuse and had much less Spanish in their heads than us, I thought to reassure myself. We hobbled along in line, received our stamps and got back on the bus, thinking perhaps that this was the end. Twenty minutes later we did it all again for the Peruvians, and again thought this was the end....

So, here in the real world (Porto Viejo, Ecuador) it's lunchtime. This will have have to continue at a later time.