Bussing Back Home

Last Sunday night we sat under a lamp post, fighting off flies, and waiting for a bus outside the border town of Huayaquilles. There was a huddle of gringos standing next to a heap of bags, everyone ready to scatter in different directions in Ecuador, many trying to skip the country entirely by taking a bus to Quito and then flying somewhere else or heading toward grand Columbia. In all relevant conversations, I try to persuade these people to linger just a little longer. "It´s beautiful here," I tell them.

After traveling the near-entirety of the Peruvian coast and back (a mad dash of more than 3,000 kilometers in 11 days), we took two more long stretches of buses back into the central sierras of Ecuador´s Andean mountains. As the bus tilted upward, the air began to cool and the roadsides were again sprinkled with farm animals and white wooden crosses, designating the drivers and passengers that didn´t survive the mountain roads, I felt like I was returning to a familiar and welcome place, my transient latin home. I thought back to a week earlier, when I was sitting at a sports bar in Lima, watching my first basketball game in months. The guy next to me, who was coincidentally from Anandale, VA, had worked several years for the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador and Peru. He asked me how I got around, and I told him I took buses everywhere. Over 100 hours of bus rides at the time.

"Well, I´m glad you made it," he said.
"Why, do the buses have a lot of problems in Ecuador?" I asked. I mentioned the crosses I always saw.
"They turn over, all the time."
"Really?"
"All the time." He asked how I was getting back to Quito.
"By bus."

He laughed, left a tip, and wished me good luck. With him gone, I turned to my neighbor to my right, a young man with a beard of equal scruff to mine. He said he was biking from Buenos Aires to his home in Texas, the most ambitious of trips I had heard of yet, although he had met a few people biking the entirety of the Pan-American, from Alaska to Buenos Aires, Argentina. He told me when he crossed the border into Bolivia he had come upon a bus turned over on the side of the road. Its passengers stood next to it, dazed and bleeding, but no one wanted help. He biked further up the road and found some some pick-up truck drivers and tried to persuade them to help, but they didn´t want to. Apparently a lot of the passengers were smuggling things, and to get across the border they had to be smuggled by the truck drivers, who paid off the officials at the border. The drivers didn´t want to have to go back near the border, in fear of reuniting with the officials they just paid off. It would be awkward. (for a great pictoral blog read about his ride, check out http://www.swiftkidhistory.wordpress.com/)

After surviving another series of bus rides, zooming through curvy mountains, making blind passes at high speeds in both day and night, we stopped in Baños for one last day of thrills in one of my favorite cities, and we were not disappointed. In the morning Sarah and I took a ride out into the secondary forests and climbed a couple hundred meters to the top of a jungle river canyon that cut through the thick greens and rust-colored rocks in a series of cascades. Then, with our guides and the appropriate safety equipment, we rappelled down four consecutive waterfalls, the last being a hundred feet high, and then slid down the fifth. Our guide, with harnesses and ropes, preferred to run down the waterfalls face first. At the end, our guide told us, "Thank you for surviving."

After resting in the afternoon, we decided to ignore the rain and some kind of off-road vehicle to drive around the area. Sarah and I debated for a long time which vehicle would be best, the dirt bikes, the buggy, or the four-wheeler. We settled on the buggy. Less than an hour later, we drove it along a river road that went up and down like a series of waves. Going up a tall wave, a band in the motor snapped, and we stopped moving. We pushed the buggy for a kilometer, digging our heels in the road on the way up, and coasting on the way down. We made it to the small town of Lligua, a couple kilometers outside of Baños, and had to stop to let a fun-sized monkey named Paco cross the road. Soon after, a stumbling man in a suit offered to help us. His name was George. He worked in a small political office in Lligua, and he had been drinking all day. He told us we have no authority in Baños, so he would use his political influence to help us. Then he repeatedly offered us candy. I find it hard sometimes to reject someone´s help when they are so insistent on being generous. More than anything, I think he was bored, which is probably why he drinks all day long in his small dark office, a politician in a town of three hundred people who likely have no need of politicians or clerks. So we sat in his office, watched him urinate in the bathroom, ate his candy and waited until someone showed up in a four-wheeler and towed us back to town. I rode in the buggy, trying delicately to break just enough so that we didn´t crash into each other, but not too much that I didn´t lose the slack in the rope, snap it, and go flying off the side of the road. At night, we washed off our small adventures in the volcanic hot spring pools, and left the city feeling cleaner than ever.

We are now in Quito, doing whatever last things we want to do before we return to the States. I find it hard to believe I lived in this city for four weeks, and yet I remember all my adventures in the places after with more vividness and enthusiasm. Nevertheless, it is good to relax at our final stop, knowing there are no more buses or broken buggies to wear us out. I confess I am tired, fatigued by our scramble up the coast. I move slower and with less excitement than I did weeks ago. And while I am disheartened I have to leave soon, I am also happy at the idea of returing to family and friends, dark beer and other certain comforts. But the trip is not over yet.