Just Getting There

It started auspiciously enough. We boarded the bus at 11pm for a 7 hour drive to Lago Agrio, in time for breakfast before our Amazon basin tour departure at 9:30. They put on a movie, a poorly dubbed, clearly pirated Steven Seagal movie, the acting so poor even the video cut out before it was all over. Rather than watch, I spent my time talking to the one American on the bus, a girl who taught English in Quito. Falling into her teacher role naturally, she started to put me through a spanish grammar boot camp. Difficult, frustrating work when there's 40+ ways to conjugate any verb, and most are irregular.

When she fell asleep, along with virtually everyone else on the bus, I tested myself by talking to the one woman still awake. I tried to talk to her, she tried to talk to me, but the language barrier was impenetrable. It made my head hurt. The only saving grace was the rare (but not rare enough, in her opinion) occasion I talked loud enough to wake up my teacher and have her fill in the gap in my sentence. The movie was over, the lights were out, and I couldn't talk to anyone. I knew this would be a long night.

Then we stopped. A roadblock, I figured. The driver, God willing, was legal and we'd be on our way in a minute or two. A minute turned into 5 turned into 10 turned into 30, and we didn't move. I became aware of other lights around us, and it dawned on me that nobody on this road was moving. Against better sense, I got out of the bus to look around. A line of buses was in front of us. I practiced my counting as I walked. Uno, dos, tres... I'd reached veinte y siete by the time I reached the front. 27 buses, stopped dead in their tracks by a mudslide. It was only 1am. This was going to be a very long night.

Attempting to talk to the people gathered to gawk was even more frustrating than before. Atleast the woman on the bus tried; the men on the road treated me like a leper, a person who wasn't even there. Before too long, I returned to the bus to try and sleep. Sleep would not come, and never did. When I tried to go for a walk, I discovered I was locked into the bus overnight. No light, no sound, no talk, no space, no freedom, no sleep. Pure hell. Truly homocidal thoughts bubbled.

Around 4:30, we finally started moving. Beautifully, we were unstuck in time to make our 9:30 departure... we pulled in line behind another bus near the front. A bus in front leapfrogged two spots ahead. We weren't going anywhere, just jostling around to see who'd be first to move when we finally did get moving. One driver tried to cut another, but the other bus wouldn't let him in, and he was stuck blocking the second lane. More buses turned the road into a giant clusterfuck. Stupid selfish dicks preventing help from ever actually reaching us.

Around 7am, the buses started moving. Other vehicles, squeezing past on the shoulder, honked in celebration as they passed. We were unstuck, and perhaps they'd even wait for us. After all, I'd come to find most of my tour was on the bus with us, including the tour guide and my English teacher. Except, we still werent moving, even as all 20-something buses behind us passed us. When I got out to investigate (the door was finally unlocked with the rising sun), I found the road hadn't been cleared at all; tired of waiting for nearly nonexistent government infrastructure to do their job, the buses just forced their way across the mud. Buses roared and lurched and tipped, nearly falling over, often getting stuck and needing to be pushed back to try again.

That said, buses were making it. Why were we sitting on the side of the road? Summoning the best of my Spanish, I talked to the driver and figured out that the bus was new, and he was scared of tipping it. We were stuck for hours because our driver is a pussy, despite the fact that he was previously a dick cutting everyone off. The man is both a dick and a pussy. He should go fuck himself.

Finally at 8:30, a steamshovel came and cleared the road. We were the last bus to cross.

Afterwards, the ride was pretty typical, except that we stopped for breakfast, which is strange for a public bus, and in the restaurant was a small monkey in a plastic cup, which is strange anywhere. In a small way, I was glad we were stuck, as I got to enjoy the beautiful cloud forest scenery we were driving through. Almost justified missing my Amazon tour.

We finally arrived in Lago Agrio at 2:30, and found to our surprise a small van waiting for us. Seems that if we really motor it, we would be able to catch a motorized canoe downriver to the lodge. The bumpy potholed road (Ecuador Dept. of Transportation) became a bumpy potholed dirt road, and sleep was impossible, especially since my head kept smashing against the window and the seat in front of me. We arrived at the river at 4:30.

Cruising down the river on a motorized canoe while the sun set was actually quite a lovely experience, almost justified being stuck behind a mudslide for 8 hours. We arrived at the lodge at 6:30, nearly 20 hours after leaving Quito.

After dinner, surprisingly tasty for a small jungle lodge lacking any electricity, we were shown to our beds. I had a room to myself, thanks to the imbalance of boys and girls and a preponderance of married couples. However, I wasn't alone. I shared my room with a gecko, ants, a colony of cockroaches under my bed (and later, in my backpack), a hornet nest near the door, potentially-malarial-or-worse mosquitos near the window, a brown widow spider above the toilet, and a goliath bird eating tarantula on my ceiling. I had arrived in the Amazon.