| Monday, December 29, 2003 | ||
| Out of Ecuador |
| Tuesday, December 30, 2003 | ||
| Out of Ecuador |
| Wednesday, December 31, 2003 | ||
| Out of Ecuador |
| Thursday, January 1, 2004 | ||
| Out of Ecuador |
| Friday, January 2, 2004 | ||
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Even before I had arrived at the customs window, I could hear a hardcore EcuaCumbia playing quietly somewhere inside the airport. I felt an involuntary smirk rolling out across my face. Soon I would find that my two 35 gallon Tupperware containers with a computer in each had somehow arrived in perfect condition (with the exception of all the smashed audiocassettes that the baggage inspectors had caused when they removed a hard drive, allowing a number of audiocassettes to fall into the space created by the absence of the hard drive, and then set the hard drive back down on top of all the displaced cassettes). The shift from the orderliness of doing things in the United States to the sheer idiocy of the every-man-for-himself EcuaPhilosophy was immediately apparent.
As I slowly pushed my 200 pounds of supplies on a cart through the EcuaGridlock caused by everyone trying to storm out of the airport ahead of everyone else, I saw a figure at the very front of a crowd gathered in front of the airport- a figure cast in a low, shadowy hat but wearing Ela's smile. She had just been in Montaņita with every other Peace Corps volunteer for New Years. The surrounding chaos did not permit for much more than perfunctory greetings before we had to begin our scramble for a cab to keep from getting run over from behind by the masses of people needlessly competing for ample resources. We cabbed directly to the Sander Hotel. After getting a room and stashing all my baggage there, Ela and I set to work tracking down a pizza place in the yellow pages that might deliver (it was almost midnight and no other restaurants were open downtown that could feed us). Ela got hold of a Domino's that could make us a pizza but they would not deliver it. For that we would have to take a cab. And we did. |
| Saturday, January 3, 2004 | ||
| The plan had been to leave Guayaquil for our respective sites early in the morning, but, as there is rarely any reason to be absolute about anything ever in the peace corps because cut and dried deadlines do not exist, we decided it would be more fun to blow off going home and hang out in Guayaquil. We actually caught a city bus (my first ever in Guayaquil) to the big Malecon 2000 boardwalk along the river. Construction on the Malecon had been completed since our last visit and it seemed half the city had gone down there to squat in the Malecon's park benches and stroll its walkways and play in its playgrounds. After eating, we crossed the street into the large market there so Ela could shop for bootleg DVDs. At 7pm, we tried to go see an IMAX movie at the Malecon's IMAX theater, but a stupid sports flick was showing and a better movie wouldn't be playing for another 2.5 hours. We cabbed to the Mall del Sol to attempt to catch a movie there, but the movie times were too late and almost nothing good was showing anyway. |
| Sunday, January 4, 2004 | ||
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Around 2 pm we cabbed to the bus station, which we found to be the height of pandemonium because it was the Sunday after New Years and the entire country was headed home from visiting family elsewhere. Ela bought a ticket for a 2:30pm bus and was gone immediately. The CLP bus line told me that tickets for Salinas bought now would be for busses leaving at 8pm. The reason being that the road between Salinas and Guayaquil has its Salinas bound lane shut down on Sundays during the tourist season so that accidents will be reduced when the flood of weekend vacationers spill out of the peninsula. Those headed for Guayaquil are allowed to drive on both sides of the highway (I seem to be the only one who finds this measure ridiculous. Sure, you will have less accidents if you refuse to let 50% of the automobiles enter the motorway, but that is like saying you will have less heart bypass surgeries if the populace eats only grass clippings). In any event I was screwed. I found a bus line that said it would get me out of the bus station at 5pm, but that only meant I would be sitting at the roadblock until 8pm in a bus instead of at the bus station.
At 6pm, my bus parked at the mother of all traffic jams and sat there unmoved until 8pm. Only busses had been stupid or desperate enough to actually drive up to and sit at the roadblock. The side of the road was teeming with grills and stoves cooking up food to sell the captive travelers. Vendors with every type of foodstuff known to Ecuador were going bus to bus making a killing. At 8pm, the roadblock was dismantled, and the busses fired up their engines and rumbled out of there in a cloud of diesel smoke that would make Beijing look like Lhasa. Ironically, due to the massive cluster of busses now employing the every-man-for-himself EcuaPhilosophy, our bus had to jam on its breaks several times to avoid crashing into other busses (recall that the roadblock was established to reduce accidents). I arrived in Santa Elena around 9:30pm and after pitting all the heretofore peaceful cab drivers against each other and leaving the cabdriver spot in front of the park in total chaos, I received a $3 ride to Tambo. As we passed through the main drag of Tambo, I could see a number of figures sitting in front of Merci's tienda. As it was Sunday, the figures were obviously Julio's family. The figures had certainly seen a strange vehicle turning into the neighborhood down where Julio lives, for the truck had not yet even pulled away before the family came moseying up to investigate. The family seemed tired. My reception was pretty much non-existent. In spite of everyone showing their teeth in a manner that could pass for smiling, only a single wisecrack flew- that my 70 pound Tupperware containers were probably full of candy (I'm known for hitting the junk food aisle at Hipermarket pretty hard). We pulled out one of the computers and plugged it in. Susanna poked at all the keys on the keyboard for 5 minutes before it was plugged in. I gave the family the usual exhibition of all the new things I had brought with me and by midnight they had excused themselves to bed. |