Hitching a Ride
[Needs more editing]
I didn’t know that the bus tickets here are like stamps, although I’d suspected it for a while. The sign in the bus station proclaiming ‘No Refunds, No Changes, Know Where You Are Going’ may have caused my doubts.
In any event, I had come to Buccoo with a single ticket, figuring they’d be on sale in any bar or minimarket. They weren’t. The town’s only ticket outlet was closed.
Now what?
Calm down. There were several solutions. I could convince the driver to let me get the ticket at the station (fat chance, but worth an effort). I could walk to the next town and buy one there, catch a maxi, or hitchhike. After all, at least two thirds of private cars here moonlight as route taxis. It wouldn’t be free, but it would be considerably less than a tourist taxi.
I crossed the road and looked around. There was a bus shelter just behind me. In front of it stood a woman in a worn dress. She had an expression on her face that I recognised, but she was holding some papers.
“Are you going to Scarborough?”
She nodded.
“Got a ticket?”
She shook her head. Only later did I realise that she probably didn’t need one; they have bus passes for the elderly and disabled here. For now, I thought we were in this together.
“OK, I’ll try to us catch a lift—” a hire car zoomed by “—If only I could see the drivers earlier.” I thought that tourists were my best bet. The lift would be free for starters. And boy, would they be surprised if I asked them to wait while I fetched my companion. The woman—who hadn’t said a word—had retreated into the deepest shade of the bus shelter.
Another car zoomed by, but the tinted windows made it impossible to see who was inside until it was too late.
After a while, a car pulled over on the other side of the road. A hand appeared out of the side window and the driver yelled something. I ran across.
“You’re going to Scarborough?”
He said something I didn’t catch and made a gesture I interpreted as having to turn around. He had a passenger next to him whom he might have to drop off first. A route taxi after all.
“OK, I’ll wait.” I made to go back to my spot.
“No, no, come in.”
“There is a woman by the bus stop. She doesn’t have a ticket. Could she—”
“No, no. She be OK. Come in.”
I crawled onto the back seat, and that is when I spotted the beer bottle clamped between the man’s thighs. The patois wasn’t all that had lent a drawl to his voice. He was pissed.
He introduced himself as Glen.
We set off in the direction away from Scarborough, and kept driving, the car swerving every now and then onto the other side of the road as Glen turned his head to talk to me.
“That lady there,” he said, “she’s not right.” He tapped his head with one hand, while making a course correction with the other. “Krank“.
By now I wasn’t surprised that everybody here seems to speak a few words of German. Glen had been married to one. What pissed me off was that most people took me for a German on sight. If I can’t be British, why not Scandinavian? Or at least Dutch? Not that I had the leisure to contemplate this then.
“Watch that lorry!” I cried.
Glen grinned, turned around, and swerved back onto his side of the road. There should have been enough space, but a panicky reaction by either driver might have caused a head-on collision.
“You’re going to Plymouth?” He turned around again.
“No Scarb—” But whyever not? Plymouth had shops that sold tickets. “Yeah, Plymouth is fine. I can catch the bus from there.”
“You want to go with us?” He indicated his friend who had remained silent the whole time.
“No! I— I mean I’ll have to go back to Scarborough. I have work to do.” That wasn’t a complete lie. The internet café was open until six and I thought I’d better get back before then.
“Oh, OK,” Glen said. “Relax.”
I hic-upped a laugh. “I am relaxed. This is very kind of you. It’s just—You hear stories. I’m not looking for, you know—” Even the LP suggested that lone women hitching in Tobago were interested in more than just a lift.
“Oh, you’re not interested in boys? Bist du schwühl?”
“Schwul, the word is schwul.” I could have bitten off my tongue. This conversation wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to go. But strangely, I didn’t feel threatened. I thought that Glen was drunk enough to handle, and as for his friend, he seemed harmless enough.
Once again Glen told me to relax. He spotted some people, stopped and reversed. Drivers here always hoot at friends, stopping to talk to them or give them a ride. It’s that kind of place.
A man holding a beautiful girl toddler got in and placed the child between us on the back seat.
“My half-brother,” Glen said. This didn’t feel threatening at all any more.
We dropped the man and child at a house up a hill and a few moments later, we stopped at a junction in another village.
“You’ll get your ticket there,” Glen said, pointing at a shop across the street. “Wait on the corner.”
With that, he drove off. I looked around. On a fence almost in front of the was a sign advertising the third Reggae Road Block later tonight on the hard court, Festival Yard. It took me a while to realise that this sleepy village was Plymouth. I kept imagining an industrialised harbour town.
I got the hell out of there.
The bus was on time. The internet café had closed early.
Tags: Americas, Neither here nor there, Tag Index
Denni