Cuenca, Ecuador to Lima, Peru

12 PM Wednesday, December 8 through 1:30 PM Thursday, December 9, 2004:

Before we proceed to the main content of this post, reconstructed to the best of my recollection and ability, let us reflect upon certain undisputable truths:

1) All people are imperfect and some people are more imperfect than other people; these less perfect imperfect people invariably fall into a category I like to call Other People.

2) Barf is gross, even when its little-kid-barf.

3) People who tell you that nobody will accept United States Dollars in countries with plummeting currencies are trying to rip you off, end of story, period.

4) The Japanese make really strange TV programs.

Ponder the foregoing, then try pondering it for 25 hours as you sit in a fuzzy little chair watching bad movies in front of a man whose snoring sounds like a family of enraged, electro-shocked grizzly bears wrestling in a pit during World War III.

Day 1: Wednesday, Schmendsday

11:58 AM --- Laura and I arrive by cab at the main bus station in Cuenca. Men in front of the terminal are shouting all sorts of destinations at us, including the town we want to reach that afternoon, Huaquillas, on the border of Ecuador and Peru. They rush us into their ticket office, informing us that the bus departs in approximately 2 minutes. Are there other buses? Better buses? Cheaper buses? Damned if we know and even more damned if they´ll tell us. This is, by the way they make it sound, the last bus to Huaquillas we can catch in this century. In fact, Cuenca may be bombed to smithereens by tiny pink elephants from outerspace within the next 20 minutes, if you really want to know their opinion on the matter. We buy tickets and board the bus.

12:15 PM --- The bus doesn´t suck all that much. There aren´t too many people on it to begin with and it doesn´t reek too much of diesel fuel, at least not yet. We are slowly departing Cuenca, stopping every two minutes or so to let another passenger onto the bus. At these same stops all sorts of vendors (food, drink, multi-colored pens and pencils) board the bus to hawk their wares in rapidfire prepared speeches, briskly walking up the aisle and back again, sometimes several times. One boy of approximately 12 years delivers a positively glowing sermon on the little packages of chewing gum he is trying to sell. "It is a very fine product, a very fine product" he says, as if trying to sell us a toaster or tractor. After his first speech fails to produce a buyer, he returns to the front of the bus to tell us about his father´s abandonment of the family, the poverty he has endured and his effort to make an honest living free of crime by selling goods to support his mother and brothers and sisters. I hate to seem so unsympathetic here, but I don´t buy anything; the gum packages make the "very fine product" look roughly half as appealing as children´s cough syrup and, unfortunately, I have heard this sad and undoubtedly true story too many times before to keep count. If I bought from each child, I´d soon become the broke owner of half South America´s bubble gum. In any event, the boy gets off the bus at the next stop. Other vendors come aboard, some children with gum, some not.

12:45 PM --- The bus has filled up to two-thirds capacity now that we have made it out of Cuenca´s outer limits. Its mountainous farm-land now, though we still make a stop or two as we go to let additional people on board. The man in the aisle across from us is wolfing down on a whole papaya that he just bought from another vendor. Bits and pieces fall down his chin and onto the floor. A gooey, juicy pool develops under his chair. Slurp, slurp, slurp. I don´t mind too much. I have grown to loathe papaya on this trip, but I am also reminded that I am getting hungry.

12:48 PM --- Hallelujah! Salvation in the form of freshly fried chicken and french fried potatoes. A woman and her 3 little son gets on the bus with an assortment of lunch foods. A little styrofoam bowl of fries with a chicken breast on top sets me back $1.00. The food is oily and piping hot. As we all know, Fried + Oily + Piping Hot = Mmmmm! * Delicious! I wolf down the food and feel happy and content. (Little do I know that this will be the last thing I eat that resembles food for the next 27 hours.)

1:00 PM --- I have an oily, dirty styrofoam bowl in my lap. I don´t see where the garbage bin on the bus is supposed to be. We are driving through beautiful mountains and forest, our bus hugging the side of the deep ravines that run through the Andes and descend into lush, lime green valleys. Papaya Man is slurping down the last of his papaya across from me. He gets up with the gooky, sticky remnants of his meal and wraps them up in a bundle of newspaper. He smiles at me and motions toward my bowl. An offer of assistance! "Gracias," I say as I gladly hand him the refuse. He nods and heads toward the back of the bus to do his duty. Several seconds later I look behind me to see him tossing the bowl and papers out of one of the back windows.

2:00 PM --- I finish reading the book, Life of Pi, about a boy who is stranded on a lifeboat adrift on the Pacific with a royal Bengal tiger onboard (its worth noting that the book includes some very gruesome though humorous accounts of the boy´s efforts to procure sustenance while at sea, passages I grow to appreciate more and more over the next 24 hours). I look around the bus. No tigers. I'm now officially bored. I look out the window for the next hour. Mountains. Big mountains and bigger mountains that look like mountains piled on top of mountains. The higher the peak, the darker and angrier its shade of green. Certain sections of rock and dusty land are curved like enormous, mile-high baseballs clustered tightly together and fused. I pause to consider that its a wonder there are any roads through here at all.

2:15 PM --- I'm now really, really bored and have no patience for the roads, wonder or no wonder that they are there at all. Maybe I'm a little bit cranky and impatient. Maybe I should get some sleep.

2:30 PM --- Can't sleep. Try to start Philip Roth's American Pastoral but its too serious. For somebody who may well be one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, I have noticed that Roth can't seem to write more than 10 consecutive pages without including a Jewish character who is or was a star high-school baseball, basketball or football player from New Jersey. His protagonist in this book was all three. Major Yawn. But no sleep.

3:00 PM --- We stop in the middle of nowhere to let a few more people on the bus. One woman queing in the line to board has a duck. Very fortunately, however, it seems there was some intervention of some kind. To my knowledge, no duck ever boarded the bus.

3:10 PM --- More beautiful mountain scenery. A little old man in a suit smiles angelically, almost wistfully, as he tosses an empty bottle, a plastic bag and other assorted articles of garbage out the window.

4:00 PM --- I'm hungry. I'm tired. Boo hoo hoo. The mountains have given way to dry, sterile dirt and dusty flatlands. The bus makes more speed, however.

5:00 PM --- A sign signals our arrival in Huaquillas. What an absolute hole, I think. "What a hole," says Laura. Of course its not exactly PC to have such thoughts about a poverty-stricken place where people live far below the means they would choose to live at if they actually had any choice. Nevertheless, really, the place looks like it has been burned down, half-built back up and then torched anew. And what is more is that, sadly, the second torching was an incomplete and unsuccessful effort.

5:15 PM --- We get off of the bus. Several men immediately approach us as we are retrieving our luggage from the storage compartment under the bus. I decide that I don't like them and want them to get lost. However, they chat up Laura first. Do we need to change dollars to Peruvian Soles? Do we need a bus to Lima? Do we need a cab to the Ecuadorian immigration offices to get our passports stamped (its actually 4 kilometers away from us)? The answer in my mind, to all of these questions, is yes, but not from you. I decline to change any money with them. They tell me that there is no way to change money across the Peruvian border before boarding the bus to Lima there. I don't care. I won't exchange any dollars with them. The younger man present shows us to a taxi to go get our passports stamped. Three dollars for the trip there and back again, at which point we can walk down the road and over a bridge to the Peruvian side. This doesn't sound like the worst deal imaginable --- we do need the exit stamp from Ecuador. We hop in the cab. Strangely, the young man hops in the cab as well. After several minutes of driving, I find myself paranoid and curious. "You are coming with us to the immigration office?" I ask.

"Yes," he replies. He speaks very passable English. This makes me trust him a bit less for some reason.

"Why?" I ask, very bluntly. Its clearly not out of the goodness of his own heart.

"Is OK," he says, "I don't ask you for any money. There is a bus company to Lima I know. Here is the information [hands over crumpled up pamphlet for bus from Tumbes, Peru to Lima]. Very good bus. My name is Jose-Louis, what is yours [smiles]?"

We introduce ourselves. At the immigration office we obtain our stamps within minutes. As soon as we pull back into the same position we left from in Huaquillas, Jose-Louis's partner, the money-changer, is back in our faces urging us to change money with him.

"No," I say. "No, no, no." Now Jose-Louis is telling us to follow him toward the Peru-Ecuador border where we can hop a cheap collectivo (shared taxi) to the Peruvian immigration office and then head to Tumbes, 45 kilometers away, where we must catch the last Lima bus at 7 PM. Its now closing in on 5:45.

5:45 PM --- We walk through crowded and filthy dirt streets, through street vendors and roadside stands, toward the border. Jose-Louis's friend has fortunately stopped plaguing after us (it took some 100 feet of walking away with continuous annoyed utterances of "no, no necessito, no quiero, NO!") but I wonder what Jose-Louis now expects for his diligent and utterly unnecessary chaperoning of us across the border. As we walk, multiple money changers spot us and excitedly fall into line after us the way rats fell into line after the Pied Piper. Each has exactly the same reaction to the sight of us: He flashes us a calculator, begins punching in numbers very rapidly and then flashes it to us again with a grin as if he were, for us and for our very own private benefit alone, revealing The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everthing (Douglas Adams pegged it at about 42, I think, but these bright speculators seemed to think it was closer to 3.5). They would follow us and follow us, meeting each answer of "no" with a renewed sales pitch. At one point I turned to one persistent follower who was making an argument for exchanging with him that I wasn't listening to, looked him squarely in the eyes and, in the driest and most disinterested voice I could muster, said "Hola. Como esta?" (Hi. How are you?) He laughed loudly and backed off.

We crossed the bridge to an area of town (Peruvian or not, it was the same town) that was even dirtier and poorer than the first. Jose-Louis turned left off of the main road and past a series of street stands. I stopped. "Where are we going?" I asked.

"Taxi," he replied. An old man at one of the stands nodded and motioned for us to follow. A younger man in a beige uniform with "Seguridad" emblazoned on his hat and arm patch made a similar motion. Against my better judgment, I followed.

At the end of the corridor of shops stood a lone taxi in a small dirt plot. A dust road stretched around the side of the shops, evidentally connecting the plot with what passed for the main road. A driver stood by the taxi. A second man in a "Securidad" uniform stood with the driver. Within another few seconds, a third man emerged, seemingly from nowhere. With Jose-Louis present, there were a total of four strangers accompanying the two of us in this otherwise lonesome and out of the way back alley. I was not happy. A second later, I noticed a fifth stranger. I wanted to get out of there right away.

Almost immediately, one of the men launched into a diatribe as to how we would need to exchange dollars into Soles before entering Peru. "You can´t change money in Tumbes," said the man, "the banks are all closed." No kidding. We had heard this some 50 times by now.

"I am not changing any money," I said. I was adamant. The notion that I would not be able to buy a bus ticket with dollars struck me as beyond ludicrous. On the other hand... could they actually be telling the truth?

"Maybe we should just do it here and be done with it," suggested Laura. She reached into her purse. Our entourage of well-wishing and supportive new friends all but drooled on their shoes at the sight of 5 crisp 20 dollar bills.

"Yes," said one of the men. "$100 would be good. The bus tickets from Tumbes to Lima cost $40 each."

There was some more discussion. In the end, I reluctantly exchanged $20 with... Jose-Louis. Laura had a change of heart and exchanged only $40 of the $100. All of the men told us that we would not have enough money to get on the bus and that we would not be able to exchange any money in Tumbes. They tried to pressure us to change even more money.

Our good pal Jose-Louis disappeared immediately after the currency exchange, along with Hombre Securidad and Stranger #5. We were left with the taxi driver and Stranger #3. They quoted us a rate of 10 Soles (about $3) to take us to the Peruvian immigration office, where we could then take a collectivo into Tumbes to catch the 7 PM bus to Lima.

6:05 PM --- We wrap up a routine and utterly uneventful interaction with the Peruvian immigration authorities. Stamps in our passports, we head back to the taxi. Laura asks them what it would cost for them to take us the 45 kilometers to Tumbes. The response is vague, very vague, a whisper wrapped in a mumble (wrapped in a lie). Apparently, its only another 10 Soles.

6:10 PM --- As we drive along, Laura and I realize that we really don´t know what these two clowns in front expect from us in return for driving us to Tumbes. We ask them again. The answer? "10 dollars each."

6:11 PM --- [The following exchange is translated from broken Spanish]

Laura: "No."

Me: "No, no, no. Take us back. No. We aren´t going with you."

Stranger #3: "You need to catch the last bus to Tumbes at 7. You won´t be able to catch any other cars to Tumbes tonight."

Me: "Not important. I can go the next day. I don´t care. Stop. Turn around. Take us back."

Driver: "We take you for only $10 each."

Me: "That´s the same price you just said! No."

Driver: "Ok, but its 20 Soles back. 40 Soles total." The driver starts turning the car around.

Me: "No. It was 10 Soles to the immigration office. I will give you 10 more Soles for taking us back."

Driver: "Each. Perhaps you don´t understand what we say. 20 Soles total each way." He´s lying.

Me: "20 Soles. You said 10 Soles total each way."

They don´t respond, but I think we´ve made our point clear. We drive for several moments.

Stranger #3: "Give me the 20 Soles."

Me: "Not until we get back. After."

[Stranger #3 looks pissed. For the record, neither Driver nor Stranger #3 were very big. At a wispy 110 pounds, Laura could have probably strangled the driver with ease. While I understand that you have to be careful in these situations, we had already been in one far worse, in the alley. At this point, I felt relatively safe in assuming that if any of our new friends had wanted to flat out rob us, they would have done it already. Note: Admonitions to be more careful in the future are quite unnecessary.]

6:12 PM --- Enlightenment hits me like an enlightening brick in the head. Oww! Enlightenment hurts. We have definitely, without a doubt, been ripped off on the currency exchange. When Laura changed her $40 for Soles, Jose-Louis asked her for another $3 so as to be able to give her an even 150 Soles. Laura did not have the money in small change. What did Jose-Louis do? He let it slide and gave her the 150 Soles anyway. Currency exchange is very low margin, unless you can sucker your customer into accepting an absurdly bad rate. Otherwise, generally speaking, you need to change a lot of money to turn any profit, unless you have some truly special inside knowledge as to how the markets will move. I should have seen this sooner, at the moment it happened, and screamed "Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit." But I didn´t.

6:15 PM --- We are deposited back on the Peruvian side of town across from the bridge. Laura asks a man who appears to be a legitimate authority (I say legitimate but I don´t have any answer as to whether he was corrupt) where we can hop a collectivo to Tumbes. He´s only too happy to help (Laura) and flags down a car within less than a minute. The back seats of the car are occupied. We squeeze into the front and begin our way to Tumbes. How much does it cost? One dollar each. (Note for The Record: When we finally arrived in Tumbes, the driver of the collectivo wanted payment in dollars.)

6:30 PM --- Thus far, Peru does look like an entirety different country from Ecuador. We are driving almost due south on a road that is not far to the left from the Pacific coast. Its flat and grassy. The grass on the right (Ocean-toward) side of the highway is green. The grass on the left side of the highway is half green and half yellow. The trees are low-growing and spaced far apart at semi-regular intervals. It looks remarkably similar to pictures I have seen of the Serengetti Plain.

6:40 PM --- Its a hazy, purple-pink twilight. Passenger board and squeeze in. Passengers get out on remote stretches of highway and in small, sad-looking villages formed by houses that look like little more than overgrown cardboard boxes. We pass a foreboding prison complex, a small stretch of beach, a pair of dogs enjoying romantic doggy moments in the middle of the road. There is no such thing as "two-lane traffic." There are, however, two lanes.

6:57 PM --- The driver gets us to the bus terminal just in the nick of time. The price for the bus is 50 Soles each (about $16, not even close to $40). Laura and I pull out our 50 Sole notes. The woman behind the counter takes the briefest glance and --- no surprise here at all --- says blandly: "No vale." The bills are counterfeit (I later discover that you can tell the difference by examining the paper the bills are printed on).

Do they take dollars? Yep. Sure. No problem. I pay with a $20 bill and manage to get a few valid Soles for my change. I buy a couple of bottles of water but no food. I´m getting quite hungry.

We board the bus. Its not a double-decker, but the passengers climb up quite a few stairs to reach their seats, while the driver drives from a compartment under the passengers. This means that the foward-most passengers can look out the front windows while sitting directly over the area from which the driver steers the vehicle. We have seats about 3 rows back from the front. The seats recline back quite a bit.

7:00 PM --- The bus rolls out of the terminal. Almost immediately, the TV at the front of the bus (only some 4-5 feet in front of me) blazes to life. What do we have here? A crappy Japanese show, dubbed in Spanish, about 4 little kids who are Kung-Fu/Karate/Ju-Jitsu masters. The sound the program is being played at has no consistency, so the laugh-track is occassionally three times as loud as the conversation, which dips and rises and dips. Not that I am trying to listen, only that I am trying unsuccessfully to tune it out.

8:30 PM --- Authority Checkpoint. All passengers disembark and wander into a small building with bathrooms and a food stand. I decide that its now or never as far as obtaining our sustenance is concerned. 5 Soles ($1.75) buy us the following:

---4 tiny chicken sandwiches on little rolls. There are about two thumbnails´ worth of chicken on each and a piece of lettuce the length and width of a pinkie finger.

---1 empañada with mystery meat in it, resembling some sort of sausage. It didn´t taste like anything I am familiar with and I think I would prefer to go to my grave without knowing the beaky or hoofy truth.

---2 corn-tomales.

---2 bags of plantain chips.

The corn-tomales will go uneaten (close examination produced grave doubts about their edibility) and one of the bags of plantain chips will disappear without a trace (sadly, I was unable to search and interview each of the passengers). The rest of the food was to last us the next 20 hours.

9:00 PM --- Back on the bus. And guess what? Its movie time! No more Japanese Kung-Fu Street Urchins of Death. The credits begin to roll! A film in English! It looks relatively new! Its... its... oh Dear God please kill me... its: The Prince and I. With the main lights on the bus extinguished and the private overhead lights being so dim as to be entirely worthless for reading purposes, I find myself with little choice but to watch this heaving, writhing morass of soul-destroying doody-schlock. And so it will go with three other movies on the following day. Over the course of the trip to Lima, I watch a total of four movies. I have done my best to review them for the knowledge and edification of you, the reader. Oh how I have suffered for you...

Movie Review #1: The Prince and I

Starring: Julia Stiles; Some Doofy Blonde-Haired Twitbag

Summary Plot Overview: Boy meets girl at the University of Wisconsin. Girl is a hard-working midwesterner with grit, struggling to support her way through college and into Medical School. Boy is the suave, rakish young Prince of Denmark, traveling incognito to the U.S. because a Girls Gone Wild video has convinced him that American College Girls will take their tops off for him if only he politely so asks. But oh, how horribly, horribly untrue this turns out to be. (No, I am not making any of this up.) Girl is appalled by Boy´s proposition for a full 5 minutes of movie time before realizing that Boy could very well be... Prince Charming! Dim the lights please. In fact, dim everything.

Gut Reaction: Something is rotten in Denmark. Julia Stiles looks like she has developed TMJ. Thank god this is still more watchable than those little crappy Japanese runts.

Other Notes: I was not the only reviewer to find this movie highly unsatisfying. Approximately 10 minutes into the film, a small child of the age of 4 or 5 (lets call him Billie) stumbled back from his seat in the front of the bus and threw up in the aisle directly next to me, failing to reach the bathroom in time. His mother did nothing to help clean the mess up and instead sent Billie back to his mess with a roll of toilet paper where the child, after 20 minutes or so, proved highly successful in mixing half a roll of toilet paper scraps into the steaming, putrid pile of vomit on the floor. One of the bus attendants would eventually place a towel over the slop a few hours later.

My Final Rating: PG-Labotomy.

Billie´s Final Rating: V, for vomitous.

10:45 PM --- A man boards the bus carrying a bundle of what appear to be balloons containing bells and jingly balls inside of them. When he walks its ring-a-ling-a-ling. When he sits its ding-a-ring-a-ring. What a truly wondrous and considerate object to bring onto an 18-hour overnight bus ride! Moron. Inspired by Life of Pi´s account of survival in the face of bleak adversity, I believe the passengers on the bus should have fallen upon him and cannibalized him instantly. They don´t, depriving me of a chance at a solid dinner (if they had each tried one of my chicken sandwiches, they might have seen things my way). However, lucky for me, the man sits far at the back of the bus where I cannot hear the ruckus.

11 PM --- I fall asleep as the man in back of me snores up a storm of sound and fury.

[To be Continued]