Another Wednesday Morning Sun

Pap.Pap.Pap……….Pap. I looked down at my watch. It was almost 8am on Tuesday morning. I would have stopped as the shots sounded as if they came from just up the road, but the gentlemen carrying my other bag was pressing forward - focused on getting me through no-mans land to the border control. He seemed un-nerved. Three shots. Then a slight pause. It was that fourth shot that sealed his level of intent. Those few seconds provided him plenty of time to filter the thousands of stimuli racing through his mind. And he decided to squeeze the trigger one more time. Pap.

I leaned into the cab window and indicated that I needed to go to Trujillo, the next town fifteen kilometers South. He nodded and told me to get in. My bus was scheduled to leave at 8:30pm. I needed him to hurry. “Mas rapido, amigo.” As we were making our way through the streets of Trujillo towards the bus station, the atmosphere deteriorated. No streets lights. Dilapidated buildings. Shady characters milling about. I looked over at him ¨Esta peligroso por aqui?¨

He said it is safe. I pointed to myself ¨Para mi?¨

He laughed and indicated that it would be alright, even for me, although I believed his assessment to be rather liberal. He stopped in front of the bus station and popped the trunk. He lifted my main pack and set it down at the back of the cab. Just then, another cab came around the corner and ran directly over the plastic waste strap fastener of my bag. Crushed. ¨Dammit!¨¨ I looked at the cabbie. He shrugged his shoulders. My strap was broken and there was nothing I could do about it. At least it wasn’t my foot.

I handed him a handful of coined shrapnel for the ride and made my way to the counter.

There was a line. Not a big surprise considering that in this part of the world people pretty much work at the pace of a Galapagos land tortoise. I eventually made it to the front of the line. "Tumbes, por favor." As she was filling out the ticket, I indicated that I needed to go to Quito just to reinforce that I could continue on from Tumbes.

I was told earlier that I could get a direct bus from Tumbes to Quito. She insisted that I couldn’t, scratched my ticket to Tumbes and starting filling out a ticket to Aguas Verde. ¨You need to go to Aguas Verde, you can catch a bus from there.¨

I begged her to find a way for me to get to Quito from Tumbes, but she just shook her head. ¨You need to go to Aguas Verde....” It was final. She handed me the ticket and acknowledged the next person in line.

Tumbes is 20 kilometers South of the border between Ecuador and Peru. Aguas Verde is on the border. I wanted to get a bus that would blast me across the border without stopping at Aguas Verde, except to stamp me out and stamp me in. I had seen Aguas Verde and it’s chaotic three kilometer no-mans land. I wanted no part of it.

I glanced at my ticket, handed it to the driver and stepped on the less than clean, less than modern bus. I was heading to Aguas Verde. This wasn’t going to be pretty.

I walked down the aisle to my seat. There was a woman sitting in the already-cramped seat next to mine, with her baby. Great. There is nothing like a dodgy overnight bus with a Peruvian tottler crawling all over you. I sat down and settled in. This was going to be a long one.

Up to this point, I had been with Colin and Marika all day, every day since landing nearly three weeks ago. We had our truck, our shoddy road notes and maps to assist us in navigating though our daily journeys. While there were various levels of lost mass confusion everyday which included many high stress levels, the issues are substantially different to venturing solo. I left them that morning to make my way back up to Quito to meet Gabriel. I have found the no matter how many times I journey about foreign countries solo, it doesn’t necessarily get any easier. And as for this journey - well, I had a strong feeling that it was going to hurl a tire iron or two at me before it was finished.

The sun was coming up as we darted across the Northern Peruvian desert. I knew this meant that I would be dropped in Aguas Verde within a couple of hours. My back was aching from being cramped like an oyster for eight hours and I hadn’t slept much as my gringo body was used as a tottler’s jungle gym for much of the night.

The bus came to a stop. The driver got off and starting chucking bags out of the cargo hold onto the dusty street. I guess this is it.

Aguas Verde directly translates to "green water." I find this to be an egregious act of false advertising as there was absolutely no trace of water in this shanty town, and if there was, it certainly wouldn’t have been green. I have never had the pleasure of spending a significant amount of time in tenements of Tijuana, but if I ever do, I will wake up each morning with a smile on my face, thank the world, and say "at least I’m not in Aguas fucking Verde.¨

The bus flipped around and whisked off. I picked up my bag and walked into the border control. A few minutes and a rubber stamp later, I was standing back at the curb. I knew the Ecuadorian border was two or three kilometers in a general Northerly direction through a quadrant of chaos - but as for finding a bus to take me to Quito, I was at a loss for how that would sort itself out.

I walked up to a small group of border dudes who were having a leisurely morning chat with a couple of their cronies. I explained my predicament in highly broken and grammatically butchered Spanish. They looked at one another and then one guy stepped forward and said ¨Come on, I’ll get you there¨ At least that is what I assumed (and hoped) he said. I knew this was going to cost me a few coins, if not more, but I really didn’t have too much of a choice standing there, being one of the few genome based parts of the dusty landscape outside the small stand-alone border post.

He seemed like a nice fella. Friendly and chatty, we were able to make some communication even though my border-dialect of Espanol was a bit off. He grabbed my big pack which held only clothes, and we started North. I kept a tight grip of my small pack, as it held a few rather important things.

In general, nothing moves very fast on the South American continent, but for some unknown reason the many locals seem to dart around the borders like a bunch of methed up lab rats. We scurried through the streets of no mans land. We’d come to a corner and take a right, then come to another corner and take a left - zig zagging through the quadrant of chaos. It was early in morning but there was still quite a bit of movement on the streets. People selling things, people moving goods, people milling about doing whatever it is they do on the border. I couldn’t make it 25 yards without someone running up trying to sell me something. At one point there were two gentlemen flanking me on each side, one of whom wanted to sell me a package eight plastic chip clips for a dollar and the other of whom was trying to unload a stack of counterfeit Milli Vanilli CD’s.

We passed a man standing on a small concrete bridge with an iguana on a leash. Not sure if he was waiting for a big wave of Japanese tourists to come through who thought it would be a keen opportunity for a group photo or what. But whatever the case, I think he was going to be standing there all day. Just he and his iguana.

We approached one street and we were stopped by a police officer who had it blocked, for no apparent reason. My porter friend wanted to get through and proceeded to explain to the police officer that I was from Estados Unidos - a fact that I would have rather him not known, but he had already seen my passport. As I predicted, the cop didn’t care. We had to go the other way.

We were stopped again at another corner by a police officer who had the street blocked. Once again my friendly porter ‘name-dropped’ my American credentials and once again the officer told us to go around. “Stop telling people that I’m an American you retard or you’re going to get the both of us killed! This isn’t the 80’s, American status is worth a shit anymore. Drop it.” We continued and shot up another one of the town’s dirty thoroughfares.

We stopped at the terminal of a bus company that had a bus running to Quito at 10am. It would arrive at 11pm - more than twice as long as I was told it should take to get to Quito. I decided to just go with it - as shopping around that town is great if you are in the market for chip clips or a stack of Milli Vanilli CDs, but trying to find another bus company to take me to Quito wasn’t worth my time or the risk of missing this one. I bought a ticket for $8, checked my main pack and we bolted out the door. We continued North towards the border post to get me stamped in to Ecuador. The streets calmed down as we moved out of the commercial center and into a more barren, residential area.

We were walking up the right side of the road, when I noticed a small group of people standing a few blocks up off to the left side of the road. In this quiet section of street at this early hour - it was clear that something had happened. My porter continued walking not paying any particular attention to the activity. He knew what it was, how, I am not sure.

The small group of people were standing in a semicircle circle. No one spoke. They all just stood there completely emotionless. As we got parallel, I saw the man lying on the ground in the grassy dirt lot with his head facing the sidewalk. “Que Paso?” I asked. I knew exactly what had happened but it was a natural reaction to break to the tension.

He replied to me with words which I was unfamiliar in a rapid pace. ‘Como?’ I asked. He realized that I had no idea what he said, so he simply made a gun figure with his and pulled the thumb trigger a few times.

He was walking between me and the group of people on the left. As we walked past, he glanced over several times to see me eyes - to see if I was afixed on aftermath of the violent scene. He probably thought it was the first time that I had seen something like this. I wish I could say it was.

Pap Pap Pap.....Three shots. Then a slight pause. And he decided to squeeze the trigger one more time......Pap.

I boarded the bus and sat down. There were only five us initially on the sixty seat bus as we made our way North. I am clearly no expert on the logistical movements of buses in the Western world, but from what I understand, if you want to go from one major place to another, you can get on a bus and it will take you there in a more or less direct route with a reasonable amount of predetermined stops. Well, that’s not how it works down in these parts. Because there is not a big market for long haul personal transportation, they have developed a hybrid method that incorporates the local transportation market. The bus takes off from the border, in this example, at 10am, and drives through every town in Ecuador picking people up and dropping people off whenever and wherever they like. The locals know where and when the buses will arrive, and on the flip side, the bus operators know about where and when the transportation needing locals will be standing. So a person can stand anywhere on the street, flag down one these buses, pay his .25 cents or whatever, and then ask to get off two miles down the rode or wherever is closest to his destination. And this is how I traveled all the way up from the border to Quito.

This system works well, but there are two key inherent issues. First off all, it takes absolutely forever to get anywhere of reasonable distance. Secondly, it incents the chauffers to drive like maniacs. Much like the Dominoes “30 minutes or it’s free” guarantee eventually backfired on them and cost them nearly $18 million in settlements after two separate delivery drivers severely injured one person in 1989 and killed another person in 1990, both while allegedly speeding to their destination - these bus drivers know where they need to be and at what time in order to pick up the maximum number of people waiting on the street side. And because there are many buses running the same route, the driver who gets there first will get the bulk to the passengers.

Throughout the day we made our way through what seemed to be every small, medium and large town in the entire country. The bus would go from standing room only on one side of town to empty on the other side, as I sat and watched the people pass through and countryside go by. At around 10pm, the picking people up was over. The driver stopped for something to eat and then it was a straight shot to Quito. There were about eight to ten of us left.

Quito is in a valley at an altitude of just under ten thousand feet, which requires navigating up and over the high mountain peaks of the Andes if arriving by road. The driver was taking the narrow, winding mountain passes at a high rate of speed, throwing the top heavy bus from one side to the other while passing one lorry after another. There was a Plexiglas partition between the driver and the passengers which was made translucent by a white curtain. As we were racing up the mountain being jolted about, we could see the actions out the side window and the headlights coming toward us through the front curtain as he passed other vehicles. My anger level rose with every turn. My racing mind continued assessing this ridiculous and precarious situation which continued to make me more and more angry. There was little I could do but sit there and pray I’d see Quito.

I moved up to the third row of seats on the driver’s side. A driver’s natural reaction in any accident is to swerve in order to avoid contact with himself, so if we did get into an accident that didn’t involve going over the edge, I had bought myself a few percentage points. The bit of space between me and the front bought another fraction of a percentage point in the event of a head on collision, but I didn’t want too much space as if he swerves to miss himself, I would be in position take the T bone - which is exactly what happened to five young English girls in Ecuador who were traveling from Quito to Puerto Lopez in the early evening of April, 14th earlier this year. They were sitting half way back behind the driver as he swerved to the right. None of them survived. Most others on the bus did.

We were going through the cloud cover and he continued passing and driving as if he had passengers to pick up at a certain time in order to make payroll. It was almost midnight and there was certainly no one to pick up on this road. He pulled into the left lane in an attempt to pass three lorries in a row. There must have been a blind corner. As we passed the first lorry, there were headlights coming directly at us. There was no where to go. He slammed on the brakes and we all lunged forward. The other truck slammed on his brakes as both vehicles swerved to a stop facing each other about eight feet apart - in the single South bound lane, the edge of the mountain a close distance to our left. I immediately went forward and slammed the side of my fist into the Plexiglas and started screaming at him through the barrier. My Spanish is limited but I can peal off some phrases that most people wouldn’t dare say in English, and when I ran of things to say in Spanish, I lit him up in English.

He pulled back into the proper lane and continued on.

I was out-of-my-mind furious. I wanted to kill him. How could he do this shit? It is all completely blatant and irresponsible. Why does he do this shit? He’s going to die too. Is he stupid? In mind at that moment, he needed to die to keep others safe. South America has the highest fatality rate per-mile-driven in the world. No other part of the world is even close. Not even Africa. And it’s because of this blatant, completely avoidable bullshit. And everyone on this continent knows it and no one does anything about it. I was the only one on the bus who was even the least bit outraged by this. Everyone else just kept quiet and accepted it, thousands of feet above sea level, on a dark, winding two lane mountain pass.

I thought about my parents. My friends back home, my friends around the world. I thought about the Jakubcins. My college friends. My friends at Buckhead Toastmasters. And everyone else I know. But th one theme that surfaced in my mind which I hadn’t expected was “YOU can’t take me now DAMMIT!. I have an important project to complete.” My outrage had hit a peak and began to drain me.

Ninety minutes later, we pulled into downtown Quito. It was a little after one in the morning. I had some words with driver as I got off, but it was a bit more in control. I got my bag, tossed in the back of a cab and told him to take me to the Jardin Del Sol. I had no idea where we were and I just wanted to get out of there. Before I got arrested.

The night man saw me coming and opened the door as I limped in with my bags. “Do you have a reservation?”

“I don’t know. I am Adam, a guide with Kumuka. I sent Angel an email a couple of days ago, but I haven’t checked to see if I got a response…..I’ve been on a bus for 30 something hours.”

Angel is the day time manager who is in charge of our account. He’s a little Miami Poof who’s queer as a French Peso. We always try to be friendly, cordial and cooperative with him with little reciprocity in return. We are a decent size account for him, so one would think he would be accommodating towards us, but instead he just wants to act like a little bitch all the time. That is just the way he is. And I could very easily see him not booking me a room even when there was one available - just to be a little bitch.

The night manager looked down at the reservation sheet. “No, I don’t see anything for an Adam Wilson.”

Great. Just as I expected “Are there any rooms available?”

“No, we’re full……but wait I might be able to figure something out.”

There was a small room in the back that they were currently using to store a group’s bags. The group was leaving in the morning. He walked me back to courtyard only to find the room locked and without a key. He climbed through the window, we moved the bags into the laundry room, and he offered me the room. He was concerned as it had been used as a storage room and not been properly cleaned recently. “Are you sure this OK?”

“I live on a truck and I’ve been on a nappy bus for the last day and a half….yeah, this is ok.”

I took a shower. It was 2 o’clock in the morning. Part of me wanted to go out for a beer, but I thought better of it and went to the bed.

I woke up this morning quite early which was a shock. I made my way through the lobby to the street. “Good morning Angel.” “Good Morning Adam” I walked out to the curb. The morning sun was just about to rise over the mountain top - it was another beautiful day in Quito. As walked up the street towards the internet café, I thought about the guy who was shot dead yesterday and my near miss later as the day subsequently transpired. All that was just 24 hours before - far too much process so soon on a sunny morning walk down the city sidewalk. My mind was clear and free, but a mess. I didn't know what to think.

I signed onto gmail - a few messages from friends in Atlanta and a message from Angel telling me that he couldn’t accommodate me. He must have been shocked to have walked out this morning. Little Bitch.

I popped into Skype. Gabriel was on already.

“Gabo! Como va mi amigo?!?”

“Bien, Donde estas?”

“At an internet café on Calle Calama. Where are you?”

“At Coffee & Toffee.”

“I am less than a block away…..I’ll see you in 60 seconds”

I signed off and walked up the street. Gabriel had walked out onto the sidewalk and was facing my direction. He saw me on the next block and threw his hands up. I approached him and we immediately clasped hands followed by the Latin American male half-hug - although after three years, it’s acceptable to go with a Latin American male three-quarter hug. “Dude, great to see you!”

“I cant believe it’s been three years, you look exactly the same.”

“You too, man. So, how was your trip? When did you get in? I thought you werent supposed to get in until 10?”

"No, I was supposed to get in at 10 last night but I didnt get in until after 1, it was a long trip. Not smooth. I'll tell you about it later."

He grabbed my pony tail “What’s this?!?.....

“Hahaha, that took me a long time, don’t go pulling it off now”

“You look like a fucking Argentinian. Hahaha. It’s cool. I like it. Come on. Let’s grab a coffee. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

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