We got up the next morning in time for breakfast, and tottered droopily between the room and bathroom and then upstairs to the communal area. This morning, we were on time to catch several other travelers on stools and couches around the upstairs room watching a series of televised news reports on a massive earthquake that had severely rattled the coast and central valley of Chile in the early morning hours that day.
Everyone was focused intently on dark shaky images of crumbling buildings and yelling people, and two girls from Chile were offered phones to try to contact loved-ones. The whole thing was a shock and, beyond the magnitude of the tectonic upheaval itself, threw our visit to Chile into question. We had our rolls, butter, jam and tea, and then we hit the pavement. Our plan was to check all the available airline offices for deals to Cusco. Surely, we would see more of Peru than Lima and the road.
When we arrived at the LAN office, the doors were chained and all the Friedas had been given the day off. LAN's servers, a guard told us, were located in Santiago and were down. We tried a few more offices, meeting with a variety of helpful and less helpful characters, and coming to understand that posted fares did not include the fees imposed on foreigners traveling by air in-country. Our Cusco trip was essentially foiled, and we stopped by an internet joint and headed back to the hostel.
At this point, we had to figure out how to best explore the monstrous nexus of Lima. Once back in the room, we examined the list of stuff I'd compiled from the guidebooks on the bus two nights before. We planned to stash our bags and go looking for a new (cheaper) place to crash in the old city, a journey north and inland from our digs in Miraflores. In the old city, we were told that we could get some thrifty lunch, see some excellent old buildings, and stop in at the official black market, a place called Polvos Azules. We were also advised to see a gigantic fountain-light spectacle after dark some night. As well, we decided to try our hands at getting out to a set of ruins 25k south of the city called Pachacamac, as they seemed to be the oldest, biggest thing we'd be able to reach before leaving Peru again.
Preview of next installment: We do all of this and more!
Showing posts with label Bus Trip. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bus Trip. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Lima - Not Like the Beans
Piura, as I believe I mentioned before, was somewhere around the temperature of melting flesh. The bus station was being vaguely fanned by an air conditioner that was exhausted into the very room that it sought to cool. For some diversion from the wait, we took turns watching the bags while one of us went to the bathroom and tried to cool off by bathing in the sink. To keep the level of stress in the waiting room high, the space was equipped with a television playing a strange talk show, a la the Today show but hosted in part by an Elvis impersonator and a few mischievous muppets, and in the corner several coolers full of refreshing foods and beverages with no one to sell them to the sweating masses.
When the time finally came to board our bus, the procedure was somewhat different from what had been the norm on our previous rides on the continent. After checking our larger bags we were asked to line up and proceed through a vaguely airport-like security line that involved having our bags and ourselves metal-detected and our identification checked against our tickets. Following this, we got settled on the top floor, and were treated to an airline-style video explication of the safety and convenience features to be found on bus. Most of this, as in the case of airline announcements, was really blase. The exception to this boring list of amenities and rules, was the repeated statement that the toilets onboard were for urine only. URINE ONLY. Just urine! Anyone in need of a more realistic bathroom experience was instructed to knock on the door to the drivers' cabin and request a stop, an action which seemed to me to be a clear violation of the "Don't talk to the driver!" policy which was both announced and also posted in a number of places around the bus.
The bus ride was a funny combination of the intense professionalism and robotic ineffectuality of plane flights everywhere and the down-home, personalized style of service that had come to characterize most of our bus trips up to that point. We played a goofy version of bingo that was, apparent to everyone else in the bus (I couldn't resist calling bingo upon actually getting five in a row), blackout only. We were fed a meal of chicken, yellow rice and a lot of other odd crap that was somewhere roughly on par with airline food. We watched a promotional film that contained a ringing bimbo endorsement of the Nazca area of Peru, and was accompanied by a portion of a catholic sermon taken from 60's era Spanish cinema. After this, we watched an overdubbed version of a moody Jonathan Demme film. Hearing the bellowingly overdubbed Spanish words attempt to carry this film with its subtle themes of familial angst, drug abuse, race relations in the United States and the institution of marriage was fascinatingly confusing, and the only time during the trip that a bus line would elect to pit its passengers against such weighty material :-P.
Outside the bus, was an ongoing parade of landscapes reaching from the arid to the verdant and domiciles made of concrete and rebar, ambiguous in their positions on the continuum of new construction to disrepair.
Before the sun went down, Miriam and I spent a good long time poring over our guides and trying to figure out what to do in Peru in the four or five days that we'd be spending there. Because of the state of the sacred valley, and the apparent lack of things curious, ancient and/or beautiful in the Lima area, we decided on a mosey down toward Nazca in hopes of seeing some lines and perhaps some other coastal archaeological sites as well.
As usual, we arrived very early in the morning, overdressed and partially mummified in cool dry bus air. We had found out from one of our maps that our first task of finding the Grupo Ormeno bus terminal and getting tickets back to Quito ought to be an easy one, due to its location of less than one centimeter away from our present location on the map. We got our bags, adjusted ourselves to the heat and weight, and pushed through a throng of taxi drivers to walk along a major highway. After a couple of circles, we got headed in the right direction and arrived at another bus terminal. We bought the tickets and felt a slight monetary sting, and also much relief. As it turned out, we would still have to change our plane flight from Santiago to Lima to make the schedule fit properly.
Miriam went to the bathroom and I sat in the terminal, feeling as tired and dirty as I had up to that point in the trip. My gaze bounced around the room, out of the windows and into the bustle of the roadways surrounding the terminal, and finally up to the large flat television above the counter. We were watching news and, as I looked, the story took on a more urgent tone, a redder color, and more of the screen. A series of images flashed: small planes, desert shots, ambulances, stretchers and finally petroglyphs. The news from Nazca, our latest destination of choice, was "Plane Crash". Our Peru plans had hit another snag, and we were in need of a fresh Lima alternative.
Miriam returned, and I pointed to the screen and let her watch our plans unravel for herself. We got briefly mad, but we were still just way too filthy to be overly caught up in our misfortune. For now, we needed lodging and hot, running water.
Back outside, on the edge of the great thoroughfare of eighteen or twenty lanes, we started the process of taxi haggling, aided by the price quote we'd received from the woman selling bus tickets. The first driver we asked looked back at us, puzzling over this question himself for a good long time. After a few seconds, he agreed and we tossed our stuff into the back of his taxi station wagon, house-painted yellow with boom box speakers wired up in the back. As we entered the cab, I looked around the vehicle to compare it to those we'd seen before and those we were likely to see in the coming weeks. This was the cab in which it dawned on me that none of the cars we'd ridden in were ever holding even a full half-tank of gas. Also, after we re-entered the cab, our driver asked again what our destination was, and then, seeing that we had a map, asked to borrow our map. This man, with his car full of everyday stuff, was playing cabbie for a day. After watching him drive past our street, in what should have been a well-known tourist district, twice, we finally had him pull over to the corner, and walked the final block.
We'd pre-chosen our hostel, on the corner of Berlin & Bellavista,
using the quadruple vector of cheapness, proximity to the bus station at which we'd arrived, its presence in our guidebook and the advertised opportunity to pay with plastic. Aside from those critical features, the Stop and Drop didn't sound like too bad a place. There was, as the ad in our Footprints guide specified, network access, free breakfast, and hot water. We buzzed their door at around 7:30 AM and received a mumble in return as the door opened. The bleary but friendly staff guys, dressed perpetually in pirate, engrish, surfwear, mumbled us through the check-in procedures and we had time to shower before breakfast service began.
After furiously consuming two white rolls, butter, jam and two cups of tea, and making polite conversation with the extremely skinny, middle-aged lady who seemed to be in charge of breakfast every day, sweeping and feeding the roof cat, we left the hostel and, with what must have been by official count our twentieth "second wind" of the bus travel period, went to survey the town, to reschedule our plane tickets, to come up with an alternative to our Nazca outing, to eat food, to check our respective emails and to enjoy life outside a bus.
COMING UP on TrotamundosSA:
1. Video from Lima
2. Our Heroes Match Wits with the Powerful Ladies of LAN
3. God Thwarts More Spectacles
4. Lima is Squeezed for All its Delicious Entertainment Value
5. Miriam and Peter Realize that Since Creating Blog in Cuenca, They Have Neglected to Feed or Clothe it Properly, and Thus They Must Begin to Write In Earnest
6. Indigestion
7. Fuentes Like You Wouldn't Believe!
8. A Blue, Blue Market
When the time finally came to board our bus, the procedure was somewhat different from what had been the norm on our previous rides on the continent. After checking our larger bags we were asked to line up and proceed through a vaguely airport-like security line that involved having our bags and ourselves metal-detected and our identification checked against our tickets. Following this, we got settled on the top floor, and were treated to an airline-style video explication of the safety and convenience features to be found on bus. Most of this, as in the case of airline announcements, was really blase. The exception to this boring list of amenities and rules, was the repeated statement that the toilets onboard were for urine only. URINE ONLY. Just urine! Anyone in need of a more realistic bathroom experience was instructed to knock on the door to the drivers' cabin and request a stop, an action which seemed to me to be a clear violation of the "Don't talk to the driver!" policy which was both announced and also posted in a number of places around the bus.
The bus ride was a funny combination of the intense professionalism and robotic ineffectuality of plane flights everywhere and the down-home, personalized style of service that had come to characterize most of our bus trips up to that point. We played a goofy version of bingo that was, apparent to everyone else in the bus (I couldn't resist calling bingo upon actually getting five in a row), blackout only. We were fed a meal of chicken, yellow rice and a lot of other odd crap that was somewhere roughly on par with airline food. We watched a promotional film that contained a ringing bimbo endorsement of the Nazca area of Peru, and was accompanied by a portion of a catholic sermon taken from 60's era Spanish cinema. After this, we watched an overdubbed version of a moody Jonathan Demme film. Hearing the bellowingly overdubbed Spanish words attempt to carry this film with its subtle themes of familial angst, drug abuse, race relations in the United States and the institution of marriage was fascinatingly confusing, and the only time during the trip that a bus line would elect to pit its passengers against such weighty material :-P.
Outside the bus, was an ongoing parade of landscapes reaching from the arid to the verdant and domiciles made of concrete and rebar, ambiguous in their positions on the continuum of new construction to disrepair.
Before the sun went down, Miriam and I spent a good long time poring over our guides and trying to figure out what to do in Peru in the four or five days that we'd be spending there. Because of the state of the sacred valley, and the apparent lack of things curious, ancient and/or beautiful in the Lima area, we decided on a mosey down toward Nazca in hopes of seeing some lines and perhaps some other coastal archaeological sites as well.
As usual, we arrived very early in the morning, overdressed and partially mummified in cool dry bus air. We had found out from one of our maps that our first task of finding the Grupo Ormeno bus terminal and getting tickets back to Quito ought to be an easy one, due to its location of less than one centimeter away from our present location on the map. We got our bags, adjusted ourselves to the heat and weight, and pushed through a throng of taxi drivers to walk along a major highway. After a couple of circles, we got headed in the right direction and arrived at another bus terminal. We bought the tickets and felt a slight monetary sting, and also much relief. As it turned out, we would still have to change our plane flight from Santiago to Lima to make the schedule fit properly.
Miriam went to the bathroom and I sat in the terminal, feeling as tired and dirty as I had up to that point in the trip. My gaze bounced around the room, out of the windows and into the bustle of the roadways surrounding the terminal, and finally up to the large flat television above the counter. We were watching news and, as I looked, the story took on a more urgent tone, a redder color, and more of the screen. A series of images flashed: small planes, desert shots, ambulances, stretchers and finally petroglyphs. The news from Nazca, our latest destination of choice, was "Plane Crash". Our Peru plans had hit another snag, and we were in need of a fresh Lima alternative.
Miriam returned, and I pointed to the screen and let her watch our plans unravel for herself. We got briefly mad, but we were still just way too filthy to be overly caught up in our misfortune. For now, we needed lodging and hot, running water.
Back outside, on the edge of the great thoroughfare of eighteen or twenty lanes, we started the process of taxi haggling, aided by the price quote we'd received from the woman selling bus tickets. The first driver we asked looked back at us, puzzling over this question himself for a good long time. After a few seconds, he agreed and we tossed our stuff into the back of his taxi station wagon, house-painted yellow with boom box speakers wired up in the back. As we entered the cab, I looked around the vehicle to compare it to those we'd seen before and those we were likely to see in the coming weeks. This was the cab in which it dawned on me that none of the cars we'd ridden in were ever holding even a full half-tank of gas. Also, after we re-entered the cab, our driver asked again what our destination was, and then, seeing that we had a map, asked to borrow our map. This man, with his car full of everyday stuff, was playing cabbie for a day. After watching him drive past our street, in what should have been a well-known tourist district, twice, we finally had him pull over to the corner, and walked the final block.
We'd pre-chosen our hostel, on the corner of Berlin & Bellavista,
 |
| From 2010-02-26 |
using the quadruple vector of cheapness, proximity to the bus station at which we'd arrived, its presence in our guidebook and the advertised opportunity to pay with plastic. Aside from those critical features, the Stop and Drop didn't sound like too bad a place. There was, as the ad in our Footprints guide specified, network access, free breakfast, and hot water. We buzzed their door at around 7:30 AM and received a mumble in return as the door opened. The bleary but friendly staff guys, dressed perpetually in pirate, engrish, surfwear, mumbled us through the check-in procedures and we had time to shower before breakfast service began.
 |
| From 2010-02-26 |
After furiously consuming two white rolls, butter, jam and two cups of tea, and making polite conversation with the extremely skinny, middle-aged lady who seemed to be in charge of breakfast every day, sweeping and feeding the roof cat, we left the hostel and, with what must have been by official count our twentieth "second wind" of the bus travel period, went to survey the town, to reschedule our plane tickets, to come up with an alternative to our Nazca outing, to eat food, to check our respective emails and to enjoy life outside a bus.
COMING UP on TrotamundosSA:
1. Video from Lima
2. Our Heroes Match Wits with the Powerful Ladies of LAN
3. God Thwarts More Spectacles
4. Lima is Squeezed for All its Delicious Entertainment Value
5. Miriam and Peter Realize that Since Creating Blog in Cuenca, They Have Neglected to Feed or Clothe it Properly, and Thus They Must Begin to Write In Earnest
6. Indigestion
7. Fuentes Like You Wouldn't Believe!
8. A Blue, Blue Market
Friday, April 16, 2010
Further Along The Road to Piura
After getting stamped and having brief conversations at two border crossing stations on opposite sides of Peru and Ecuador in the middle of the night we sat back down and expected a calm ride to Piura, a place I estimated to be between three and four hours down the road. It was around 2:30 AM, I thought, and finally consciousness slipped away, taking all my discomfort and cares with it.
I have had, since arriving on this new continent, a seemingly unending stream of extremely vivid, cinematic, adventurous and random dreams, replete with numerous cameo appearances from grade school classmates, camp friends, family members, pets and pretty much anyone from any group with which I've ever associated, especially my closest friends. Many have been lucid, but just as many have been so convincing, intense and engaging as to remind me of the handful of landmark dreams whose memory lingers from my youth. For example, I've had no less than five flying dreams in the space of less than two months. It's been fantastic, and I hope that this trend doesn't end immediately upon my return to the states. I don't remember exactly what I was dreaming as a drifted liminally on the bus, but I do remember that as I broke through the surface of real-time light and sound of the bus ride, I was deeply engaged with some otherworldly task and extremely reticent to use my tired eyes to see, my dry throat to speak, and my wrecked neck to focus my senses.
Harsh light and the prosody of assholes, something that is suprisingly transcendent of particular languages - at least within the spectrum of latin and germanic tongues - penetrated my sleep. Miriam was the one awake this time: "We need passports again, I think" she said, and prodded me back to life. I grabbed my documents and handed them to the two uniformed "Aduanas" (customs) men now making trouble on our bus. We had stopped again, this time for a seemingly random inspection, and after explaining that we were on the way to Lima, our interrogation terminated. The two men, each with baton and gun protruding garishly from heavy nylon belts and each wearing a thick vest with neon lettering that increased their chest sizes to the proportions of crazed roosters, now moved on to the family behind us.
As regular readers of this blog will recall, this was the family with two babes in arms who had taken to the feel of my hair, and had created something dreadlock-like on the back of my head as I fought to avoid water and create conditions that would support sleep. And now, I looked back at them, and despite the unfettered curiosity of the infants, they were a really cute family, and trying their best to make a good trip out of the worst bus seats available. Something, however, seemed to be not quite up to snuff about this little group of four, as far as the border enforcers were concerned, and as the father handed them his passport, things began to get tense. Miriam, I'm sure, had a better idea of what was actually being said, and will hopefully make her own account of these events known, but from my perspective, the police quickly took a situation in which the man spoke too casually toward them and escalated it into one in which they would instruct the man, and thus everyone else in this confined space on the importance of "respect". Things got testy, necks were strained, poses struck, voices raised, baton-handles grasped, and just when it seemed like it might get ugly, the police decided that all that these precursive gestures and hints of violence were sufficient for the time being, and the encounter wrapped up with an uneasy conviviality. It was truly Cartmanesque, and they overdid it, as if to say "What? You didn't really think we were mad did you? You didn't really think we'd use all these handy implements of destruction?"
The officers sauntered out of the bus and we got on our way. Welcome to Peru.
My dream did not return so easily after this, and the air conditioner had again begun to empty its constantly condensing bowels on we window-seated travelers. I looked out into the dark at the occasional ramshackle assemblages and sometimes more expansive structures of steel and concrete, unfinished modernist projects from bygone eras and derelict initiatives for housing development. The contrast from Quito and Cuenca was stark, and, thus far, I'd still felt little resonance with the memories I carried from my time in Southern-California-like Santiago or the multi-colored hillsides of Valparaiso. In time I drifted away again into the still-dark and dusty countryside.
The fourth or fifth awakening of the day came in Piura, some two or three hours later. This time we found our bus backing through a horde of people into a strange building unlike any bus terminal I had ever experienced before. The bottom floor of an old building had been converted into a very high-ceilinged garage-like enclosure, with a weird network of cages to help keep newly-arrived passengers free from a horde of taxi and moto-taxi (the three-wheeled conversion vehicle, like a rickshaw driven by some kind of engine between a chainsaw and a moped) eager to help with transportation, money changing and probably many other useful services. It was a skillion degrees(centigrade), as we retrieved our bags from under the bus, and we were immediately latched onto by a slender man pressing hard for a chance to be our taxi driver. Multiple attempts to get a moment to think and converse about what our next move ought to be by saying, "Perhaps," "Give us a minute," and a host of other brush-offs could not shake this tenacious fellow, and eventually, after seeing that he seemed quite clean, was asking for a fair but appropriately inflated gringo price, we gave in and followed him through the mass out into the street.
We got into the cab, somewhat nervously, and I watched as our host fastened his seatbelt and made the sign of the cross, both of which seemed terribly prudent and somehow reassured me. He then drove us, maniacally through a series of back streets in which we could have been gutted and robbed twenty times over, to a weird intersection where a man he described as his friend changed 10 dollars into roughly twenty-eight nuevo soles. This was good, our driver noted, don't change too much money, don't flash a big wad around here. We soon arrived at the Cruz del Sur bus terminal, from which we hoped to catch a bus that day onward to Lima, and paid our driver about a little over two dollars with our new soles. We had made it, and he thanked us for our patronage and gave us each a folded piece of paper full of verses about Jesus. Apparently we'd lucked into a real sweetheart of a cabbie, and he wanted us to know it for sure.
Miriam and I sat down in the waiting room of Cruz del Sur. It was all of 7 AM, and our bus would not be leaving until the late afternoon. We each carried two large bags, and were not looking forward to passing this day in the heat with this sort of luggage. For a few minutes, at least, we sat and talked about what was ahead.
Until next time, all the best from Portoviejo.
I have had, since arriving on this new continent, a seemingly unending stream of extremely vivid, cinematic, adventurous and random dreams, replete with numerous cameo appearances from grade school classmates, camp friends, family members, pets and pretty much anyone from any group with which I've ever associated, especially my closest friends. Many have been lucid, but just as many have been so convincing, intense and engaging as to remind me of the handful of landmark dreams whose memory lingers from my youth. For example, I've had no less than five flying dreams in the space of less than two months. It's been fantastic, and I hope that this trend doesn't end immediately upon my return to the states. I don't remember exactly what I was dreaming as a drifted liminally on the bus, but I do remember that as I broke through the surface of real-time light and sound of the bus ride, I was deeply engaged with some otherworldly task and extremely reticent to use my tired eyes to see, my dry throat to speak, and my wrecked neck to focus my senses.
Harsh light and the prosody of assholes, something that is suprisingly transcendent of particular languages - at least within the spectrum of latin and germanic tongues - penetrated my sleep. Miriam was the one awake this time: "We need passports again, I think" she said, and prodded me back to life. I grabbed my documents and handed them to the two uniformed "Aduanas" (customs) men now making trouble on our bus. We had stopped again, this time for a seemingly random inspection, and after explaining that we were on the way to Lima, our interrogation terminated. The two men, each with baton and gun protruding garishly from heavy nylon belts and each wearing a thick vest with neon lettering that increased their chest sizes to the proportions of crazed roosters, now moved on to the family behind us.
As regular readers of this blog will recall, this was the family with two babes in arms who had taken to the feel of my hair, and had created something dreadlock-like on the back of my head as I fought to avoid water and create conditions that would support sleep. And now, I looked back at them, and despite the unfettered curiosity of the infants, they were a really cute family, and trying their best to make a good trip out of the worst bus seats available. Something, however, seemed to be not quite up to snuff about this little group of four, as far as the border enforcers were concerned, and as the father handed them his passport, things began to get tense. Miriam, I'm sure, had a better idea of what was actually being said, and will hopefully make her own account of these events known, but from my perspective, the police quickly took a situation in which the man spoke too casually toward them and escalated it into one in which they would instruct the man, and thus everyone else in this confined space on the importance of "respect". Things got testy, necks were strained, poses struck, voices raised, baton-handles grasped, and just when it seemed like it might get ugly, the police decided that all that these precursive gestures and hints of violence were sufficient for the time being, and the encounter wrapped up with an uneasy conviviality. It was truly Cartmanesque, and they overdid it, as if to say "What? You didn't really think we were mad did you? You didn't really think we'd use all these handy implements of destruction?"
The officers sauntered out of the bus and we got on our way. Welcome to Peru.
My dream did not return so easily after this, and the air conditioner had again begun to empty its constantly condensing bowels on we window-seated travelers. I looked out into the dark at the occasional ramshackle assemblages and sometimes more expansive structures of steel and concrete, unfinished modernist projects from bygone eras and derelict initiatives for housing development. The contrast from Quito and Cuenca was stark, and, thus far, I'd still felt little resonance with the memories I carried from my time in Southern-California-like Santiago or the multi-colored hillsides of Valparaiso. In time I drifted away again into the still-dark and dusty countryside.
The fourth or fifth awakening of the day came in Piura, some two or three hours later. This time we found our bus backing through a horde of people into a strange building unlike any bus terminal I had ever experienced before. The bottom floor of an old building had been converted into a very high-ceilinged garage-like enclosure, with a weird network of cages to help keep newly-arrived passengers free from a horde of taxi and moto-taxi (the three-wheeled conversion vehicle, like a rickshaw driven by some kind of engine between a chainsaw and a moped) eager to help with transportation, money changing and probably many other useful services. It was a skillion degrees(centigrade), as we retrieved our bags from under the bus, and we were immediately latched onto by a slender man pressing hard for a chance to be our taxi driver. Multiple attempts to get a moment to think and converse about what our next move ought to be by saying, "Perhaps," "Give us a minute," and a host of other brush-offs could not shake this tenacious fellow, and eventually, after seeing that he seemed quite clean, was asking for a fair but appropriately inflated gringo price, we gave in and followed him through the mass out into the street.
We got into the cab, somewhat nervously, and I watched as our host fastened his seatbelt and made the sign of the cross, both of which seemed terribly prudent and somehow reassured me. He then drove us, maniacally through a series of back streets in which we could have been gutted and robbed twenty times over, to a weird intersection where a man he described as his friend changed 10 dollars into roughly twenty-eight nuevo soles. This was good, our driver noted, don't change too much money, don't flash a big wad around here. We soon arrived at the Cruz del Sur bus terminal, from which we hoped to catch a bus that day onward to Lima, and paid our driver about a little over two dollars with our new soles. We had made it, and he thanked us for our patronage and gave us each a folded piece of paper full of verses about Jesus. Apparently we'd lucked into a real sweetheart of a cabbie, and he wanted us to know it for sure.
Miriam and I sat down in the waiting room of Cruz del Sur. It was all of 7 AM, and our bus would not be leaving until the late afternoon. We each carried two large bags, and were not looking forward to passing this day in the heat with this sort of luggage. For a few minutes, at least, we sat and talked about what was ahead.
Until next time, all the best from Portoviejo.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Cuencafied: Or, How to Kill a Day in Southern Ecuador With Luck and Pluck
In our last episode the infant travelers had made it from one city onto a bus. There had been excitement, drama, and loss of sleep, but none to compare with what lay ahead.
Eventually, the bus stopped, Miriam was poked and prodded awake, and we found ourselves in an alley clutching our worldly posessions. The time was something like 6:30 AM, though it was around this point in the trip that we realized neither of us had thought to bring a proper timepiece, and all speculations on the subject would henceforth have to rely on information gathered from the world, or the triangulation of rough times from our respective cameras and iPods. The weather in our new temporary home was hotter than what we had left, and we gazed, dazed, slowly around the alley for approximately ten or fifteen seconds before three new and urgent conversations presented themselves for immediate response.
Our new friends were taxi drivers, and they weren´t interested in waiting for a whole lot of chit-chat, offering all kinds of helpful information and reasons why taxis were essential to our well-being at that instant. I was content to stand like a mannequin and let the sound of their voices splash off of my greasy bus face, and thankfully Miriam, in her glacial state of consciousness, had the good sense to turn to the nearest non-taxi driving person, a little old lady, and ask what a ride to the center of town ought to cost. The quote we received was a hard-driving old lady bargain (something like $2), and it calmed down our taxi friends, one of whom eventually bit.
We slid into a cab adorned with some prayer beads and a little sombrero/flag hanging from the passenger side sun-visor emblazoned with some kind of clear reference to Mexico. Miriam, waking up, and perhaps wanting to to endear us to the driver we were underpaying, asked him pleasantly "So, are you from Mexico?"
"No, I´m from here", he grunted.
Fortunately for all concerned, it turned out that we were not far from the center of Cuenca, and we soon arrived, paid, and slumped down in a beautiful plaza full of monuments, adjacent a couple of cathedrals and still nearly empty of people.
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| From 2010-02-24 |
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| From 2010-02-24 |
For a few minutes, we floundered. We were still far from Peru, and this situation had to be addressed. However, Cuenca seemed to be a pretty swell town, with more than its fair share of old and new stuff to look at, and hopefully some decent food to eat. We started to wander, deciding at first to take a look around and then try to get back to some kind of bus location to purchase tickets and continue south. Our wandering did not last long. Clearly, we were going to die of whatever kills donkeys and sherpas if we continued to lug around all the silly trash we´d brought to wear and tinker with. So, we started searching the streets for a kind looking hostel that might let us stow our packs for the day for the low, low price of nothing.
On our first try, we succeeded: not at the hostel we tried, but in a neighbor´s hostel/house attic. We happily threw everything we had into some lady´s upstairs storage space and set off to eat avocados and chips along the town´s river. It was glorious. For the rest of the day, we lived up Cuenca. We took videos of our first real experience with the cheap mid-day phenomenon known as the "Menu" (a series of posts that will arrive at some point, I promise), looked at old buildings,
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| From 2010-02-24 |
got the lay of the town,
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| From 2010-02-24 |
took buses to buy bus tickets,
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| From 2010-02-24 |
killed time planning for Peru,
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| From 2010-02-24 |
visited some fine museums,
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| From 2010-02-24 |
and even created this blog and uploaded the first post from one of their sluggish but cheap internet cafes.
And then, in accordance with the oft-described cyclicity of time, we died (got on another bus) and began our journey toward a new life in Peru, albeit not without drama in utero (Random bus switch followed by closely BORDER CROSSING @ 2AM). Those, of course, are stories for later posts.
Goodnight from a deeply structurally-cracked balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas in Santiago. Cross your fingers, and try not to think of aftershocks.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Lameness, then Redemption!
I. Lameness
The problem with posting is not currently a lack of material, as we have been scribbling things more or less ferociously at quite respectable intervals into our respective notebooks. The problem is even conceptualizing the difference between where we are now and where we were when last something was posted, not that that date has any particular correspondence to the space-time coordinates of what was actually posted about.
Also, something must be said regarding our current proximity to the singularity. Remember how in 2007 TIME magazine made "You" the person of the year thanks to the rise of a fancy little service allowing every bit of video anyone ever shot to be uploaded, indexed and compared by everyone? We are dreadfully far away from anything like this video+internet phenomenon, we are practically dialing up, we are tantamount to climbing the highest hill available in our given location (in Buenos Aires this would mean taking an elevator to the top of a large building) and morse coding these entries home via laser pointer. Therefore, much of the really tasty meat of the vacation (forgive me, I've been eating way too much grassfed beef), the video archive, will remain unseen perhaps until we return. Something to look forward to.
I believe when last you were spoken to, our story took place somewhere in Ecuador, and our physical presence was already two countries past that in Argentina. We are still in Argentina, and have a couple more days before we head off toward what I can only think to describe as an uncomfortable disaster tour of Chile, providing it does not simply slough off into the Pacific in the next few hours. I'm sure we'll have a good six days.
II. Redemption
Directly following the events described in previous installations of TrotamundosSA.blogspot.com, we spent another day in Quito. Miriam and I rose, somewhat groggy from a late-in-the-evening conversation fueled by not small amounts of cheap beer, packed and waited for friendly co-traveler Dan to return from some mildly dehumanizing bit of national, paper-gathering, bureaucratic nonsense. Apparently the Ecuador model for these sorts of goings-on is designed to function something like a scavenger-hunt with extremely vague goals and extremely rigid and unpredictable windows of opportunity, and after something like four hours, we paid Dan's share and checked out, hoping that he would eventually make it back to the neighborhood. Which he did, having completely failed to obtain the particular bits of paper necessary to appease the great mechanistic god of international relations.
To compensate for this upset, we got some delicious foods
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| From 2010-02-23 |
including the first corn that I have really enjoyed in years (choclo), the weirdest and most erratically filled tamale I've ever tasted, and some downright panaceic mate de coca. Bolstered by our meal, we shared a little internet time and then parted ways. Dan headed out to try to find a peanut butter sandwich or something and Miriam and I began our quest to find buses to Peru.
And that's pretty much how the day went, looking for tickets, deciding that said tickets were far too expensive, searching for different tickets, more direct routes, better border crossings, etc. Eventually, roughly two things happened. We discovered that all the buses were pretty much the same, all the routes were pretty much comparable and all the prices were pretty much what we were going to have to pay, so we opted for a bus that would get us out of town at 10 PM and take us as far as Cuenca.
We still had one social activity left in fair Quito, and that was a late lunchish gathering involving the SIT professors from Miriam and Dan's program: Fabian and Siena. This was held at a little middle-eastern joint near the Mariscal, and was thoroughly pleasant, though not as tasty as our brunch.
After this late almuerzo we headed to the bus station to wait, people watch, and catch snippets of overdubbed Big Daddy. Adam Sandler's overdubbed voice is a goofy thing to behold, and they really can't manage to adequately translate his nasaly humor into the big booming voice of the Spanish-speaking, leading actor. Here's a picture of a lady wearing some really creepy jeans in the bus terminal:
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| From 2010-02-23 |
After strolling out to eat a most anemic hotdog, largely a pretext for using a bathroom for free, we sat some more, and then tried with increasing exasperation to figure out which bus we were supposed to board for Cuenca. Somehow, magic, luck, and determination swirled together, and poof we were aboard. Miriam snored gently by my side as I watched dubbed Anaconda (a film which is really better this way), contemplated just how low I'd have to amputate my legs in order to continue to travel by bus for the rest of the trip, and read the guidebook entry on deep vein thrombosis....
More to follow!
And for those of you interested in reading a blog that is updated regularly and with nauseating enthusiasm and hilarity, check out: potpied.blogspot.com
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