In Which Lisa Digs Deep
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
I fear that I am beginning to sound obsessive in these pages. I keep revisiting our time in Puerto Lopez. You’ll have to forgive me—it was weirdly memorable, from the first moment to the last.
As a matter of fact, I should’ve known, from the minute we got off the plane, just how surreal it was going to be. Our pre-arranged transport never showed up at the airport. It was a two-hour drive, and the fare would’ve been significant, so we were a bit perplexed. More than a bit, actually. In four and a half years of nomading, this was the first time someone has just not shown up. (Once our airline didn’t exist, but that actually turned out to have a simpler solution than how-to-get-to-Puerto-Lopez.)
We got off the plane, made our way outside, and watched as our fellow passengers were greeted, some by squealing grandchildren, others by hotel drivers. One by one, they got into cars. One by one, they departed, until we were the only passengers left in the parking lot of this tiny, one-gate airport.
What to do? *shrug*
It should have been a sign. We should have seen the proverbial writing on the wall. Instead, we hailed a taxi. He didn’t speak English, but I used my sad Spanish skills to ask him to take us to Puerto Lopez.
At first, it seemed like a fortuitous turn of events. He was happy to stop and let us run into the mall, to pick up a few items we thought might be hard to come by in a small town in a developing country. (Non-instant oatmeal, because that’s not a thing in Ecuador. Also a couple of large jigsaw puzzles, because it turns out you can’t just pick those up in any old place. See also: bubble bath. Category: Useless Extravagances Lisa Has Searched For In Places The Electrical Grid Has Not Yet Reached, Thus Labeling Herself Most Oblivious Tourist Of All Time.)
We left the mall, having added several bags of ‘essentials’ to our luggage, and headed toward Puerto Lopez, along the coast road. It was fairly scenic, winding along the tops of the cliffs, looking out over the Pacific—not quite the Pacific Coast Highway, but interesting enough to hold our attention.
Apparently it wasn’t enough to hold our driver’s attention, though. At some point, about an hour in, I glanced in the rear view mirror, and could see his eyelids drooping. I’d been so distracted by the views, and the twisty road snaking along the cliff tops, that I hadn’t even noticed. HE WAS FALLING ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL.
I should mention, at this juncture, that I was once in a cab from JFK into Manhattan, and my driver actually did fall asleep, and smashed into the barrier in the median. We were in very slow traffic, so it was no big deal—he jerked the car back into the lane, and we were both fully awake after that. But I’m a little paranoid about sleepy drivers. Doubly so in places where it looks like the medical care might be, shall we say, not what I’m used to.
Anyway, I elbowed Lee, and he watched for a couple of minutes, and we huddled in the back seat and considered our options. Theoretically, we could’ve asked him to let us out, but it was truly the middle of nowhere. There was no way we were going to find another taxi. My idea was to get him a coffee, but the little settlements we passed through were basically a couple of shacks, a couple of residents with tables set up on the roadside, selling fish or papayas or liquor bottles full of gasoline, and a fat fishing rope lying across the road to slow the cars down. There were no hipster coffee shops to be found. I would’ve happily bought him an instant coffee from a gas station, but there weren’t any of those, either.
Lee’s brilliant idea was to talk to him. The only problem with that was the impenetrable language barrier. Oh, and Lee speaks exactly three words of Spanish (which was actually more than the driver spoke in English). So I would have to be the go-between, with my approximately 47 words of commonality.
Just for the record, I have spent the last 25 years (no exaggeration) telling my children that I AM NOT THE ENTERTAINMENT. These days I find myself telling my husband this very same thing.
But he looked at me and said, “Now you have to be the entertainment.”
Let me tell you, I had to dig deep.
What’s your name?
How old are you?
Where are you from?
Do you have a wife?
Do you have children?
How old are they?
Do they like football?
Dude—I’m a writer. Can I turn four verbs and a handful of nouns into half an hour of conversation? Why yes, it turns out I can.
After 40 minutes of racking my brain for Spanish words, while Lee fed me topics, I thought I had run out. We sat in the back seat, whispering.
Lee would say things like, “Ask him what he’s going to do tomorrow,” and I’d say, “Are you kidding? That’s in the future—that’s a whole different tense! I have no earthly idea how to conjugate that!”
And we’d both glance toward the rear view mirror, and see his eyelids drooping again.
Finally, I whispered, near panic, that literally the only thing I had left in my Spanish ammunition, the only words I knew that I hadn’t yet used, were “El bebe es feo.”
The baby is ugly. Our lives were dependent on my turning that sentence, the best-ever example of utterly useless high school language lessons, into something resembling conversation. In my entire life, I have never needed that sentence, in any language. Except at that moment, when our driver was beginning to swerve between oncoming traffic on one side and a sheer drop on the other.
If it hadn’t been so alarming, it would’ve been really funny. In 4.5 years of travel, I’ve never been that concerned for our safety (and that includes the fire in Chile). I really, really didn’t want to get into a car accident in rural Ecuador.
Google Translate to the rescue. Pardon the product placement, but I really don’t know how we could manage this lifestyle without Google Translate. I popped in a couple of words I was unsure of (when, were, high school—okay, most of the words), and cobbled together a little story about how our kids took Spanish in high school, and the craziest sentence they learned was “El bebe es feo.” It was totally pointless, but it worked.
At least, I guess it worked. We didn’t go hurtling off a cliff. He looked a little perplexed, but I tell myself that was because he was working to understand my terrible pronunciation, not because the sentences were a grammatical catastrophe. He stayed awake long enough to get us to our Airbnb, anyway. I like to think he made it back to his town, and his kids, and still tells the story about that wild-eyed gringa lady who sat in his back seat mumbling about an ugly baby.
The moral of the story is this: Pay attention in school, kids. You never know when that useless trivia will come in handy.
Here’s hoping you never need this gem from my German lessons a few years back: The bear ate my fish.
Take care,
Lisa
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