I've seen this concept advertised many times and always wondered who would sign up for such a thing. From this crazy day it appears that would be me.
We awoke early to finish packing for the four-hour journey to Santo Domingo, halfway between the Pacific coast and the Andes mountains. Just as we were finishing, our host knocked on our door. (No, Vincent, no, don't open the door until I have clothes on!) He'd come to say we would not be able to go to Santo Domingo today because mudslides had blocked the road between here and there. So we lingered together over bread and tea and had a nice long get-to-know-you session with Romel and Raquel, looked at wedding and baby pictures and heard stories of each other's lives and laughed about the vagaries of the Spanglish language. Romel, for example, said he never uses the English word "beach." And Elizabeth said the difference for her between bear, beer and bird was indistinguishable. She once told Romel, "I love you with all my hair." That cracked us all up.
In the midst of these pleasantries, the telephone rang. Elizabeth, our hostess in Santo Domingo, said that we should get on the bus right away, as it would take us longer to get there. Dutifully we said goodbye to our hosts and went with Romel from Otavalo by bus to Ibarra, a long wet ride. In Ibarra, Romel sought advice from the bus driver going to Quito. Which bus should we take. It was a bit like Russian roulette, with the loser not dying but taking a long, long bus ride to nowhere. So maybe Ecuadorean purgatory rather than Russian roulette. Romel assured us that he had found the shortest way to Santo Domingo avoiding the mudslides. But the driver had told him it would be five hours. That was likely true at 12:30 when we left the terminal, fifteen minutes late.
By 2:00 pm we were in Quito. Vincent found that he was without his Ecuador travel guide with the maps and so forth. So we were in the dark at 4:00 pm when we arrived in Quitumbe. There were no signs, we had never heard of the town, so Vincent asked another passenger, "Santo Domingo?" She replied, "Quitumbe." The driver had told us that Santo Domingo was the last stop, so we felt confident enough when the bus started up again, that we would know where to get off. We kept seeing a very large city either in front, behind or on the left and right of us. We always seemed to be headed toward one and then pass it to approach another. How many big cities ARE there in Ecuador, we wondered?
By six p.m., Vincent recognized that we were once again in Quito, having spent four hours circling the city!!!!!!!! He was getting worried. So he asked the other passenger again--"Santo Domingo?" Her reply was "four hours." He got excited in the way only an Irishman can. *!@?! begorra!
We watched the signs go by--we were going to pass Mitad del Mundo where we spent one of our first weeks in Ecuador. We knew that road eventually turned off toward Santo Domingo, so our hopes rose. I tried to call Romel to let him know our whereabouts and discovered after five or six repetitions that our borrowed cell phone had run out of minutes. (It took me that long to translate the rapid-fire Spanish message on the phone). I tried with my own cell and discovered that although there were four bars on the borrowed phone (and no minutes), there were none on my own phone. We were going to be arriving in a large city at 10 p.m. in the bus terminal, and no way to let our host on either end know. Or maybe we were going to be arriving somewhere else.
We are so fortunate that Elizabeth is so organized. She called me to find out where we were. Apparently we can still receive calls on this phone but not initiate any. She speaks very rapid Spanish, and I could only make out one word in three. Add to that that the cell phone sounds like one of those tin-can telephones we made when we were kids, and the signal cutting in and out in the mountains--I could barely understand and apparently could not make myself understood either--it was communication hell. So ironic that we are here to try to improve communications between here and the U.S. As if! At last we agreed that she would call Romel, (who has some English)--at least I thought we had agreed on this.
Five minutes later, a relief, Romel called. I was able to tell him--in Spanish, because he couldn't understand what I was saying in English--we would not be arriving until 10:00 p.m. as we had spent the first six hours circling Quito. What? Why? I could not explain it in either language.
Elizabeth called back to say she was going home to wait and asked us to call her when we were fifteen minutes away. The bus driver began playing movies (a--to me, though Vincent liked it) stupid Adam Sandler comedy plus "Unstoppable." No sound, no subtitles. A complete communication failure there. At least we knew we were on the way to Santo Domingo and that we would arrive at 10:00. I started trying to soothe my inner child, who was being ominously silent. No communication going on there, either. I tried to avoid eye contact with the movies, but gave up and watched the runaway train get stopped in hair-raising fashion.
At 9:30, the conductor came to tell us we would arrive in 30 minutes, and I began to call Elizabeth. We were out of range of any cell tower, still in the mountains. At 9:50, I reached her. The bus did not go into the terminal, but let us off at a street corner nearby. While I was getting off the bus with my heavy backpack, Romel called to find out where we were. I said we had just arrived, so he called Elizabeth. She called us, I told her where we were and after a deluge of (to me) incomprehensible Spanish (which did contain the words, "That's not where they usually debark passengers!"), she said she would find us, and seconds after, she appeared, our savior from the land of Babel. She called a taxi, brought us to her home, welcomed us, fed us, and explained at last the ten-hour journey. Just as they had cleaned up the first mudslide, another occurred, blocking the original southern route the bus from Ibarra had intended to take. That was the reason for our circuitous return to Quito from Quitumbe--they went back to the original route, now unblocked.
An adventure it was and shall remain, in our minds the quintessence of human vulnerability in the face of the awesome power of nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment