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.

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.

From 2010-02-24

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,

From 2010-02-24

got the lay of the town,

From 2010-02-24

took buses to buy bus tickets,

From 2010-02-24

killed time planning for Peru,

From 2010-02-24

visited some fine museums,

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.