Every 90 days, as a non-resident (i.e. tourist), I have to appease the Costa Rican immigration gods and sacrifice my presence for 72 hours outside of the country. In other words, I get an excuse every three months for some righteous jet-setting.
Except in this world, when we say “jet,” we mean “bus.” Lots of them, lots of rickety, coil-spring seat, retired school buses, and only sometimes do we mean a converted charter bus. But these buses are not to be disparaged.
Much like trains in Europe, buses in Latin America are where you are marinated in the culture, forced to absorb each sight and smell with every kilometer and hour that pass. They are the things you could at best espy from the stale encasement of airports or out of vacuum-sealed windows at 30,000 ft.
Originally, I was supposed to be in the states for last weekend, but
that trip fell through, so by the time the weekend got here, my planning for the new trip had gone as far as borrowing a Central America guidebook (mostly for the maps). I picked Nicaragua because it was cheaper than my other cross-border option, Panama, and because two colleagues live in Granada, a city I'd heard enough charming things about. In the end, I spent one night in Liberia, CR, near the border; two in Granada and one afternoon in Masaya; and one in San Juan del Sur, on Nicaragua's southern Pacific coast.
This might be where some of you are saying, “Well, she’s lucky she can travel like this while she’s young/before she gets tied down.”
Precisely. I am acutely aware of the fact that this is a time when I have no obligations to any job or other person, and I will indeed indulge that latitude for whatever the short or long while it lasts. That being said, it's not quite a lifestyle to be covetous of, exhausting on a lot of levels, and I doubt I'll want to go back to this however many years down the road. But still, the ability to up and go to these strange corners is nonetheless part of why I like so much living abroad right now, and the mode of transportation is inextricable to reaching those corners. Anyway, it beats having self-important TSA personnel rifle through your unmentionables any day.
So here is an exposition on how one gringita travels by bus in the third world. You can decide if you're jealous or not.
*
Pack your passport, a few pithy sundresses, two books, the toothbrush, little else, and leave straight from work for the bus station.
When the buses to your original destination are full for the next two days, hopscotch it and take the bus to the closest city to the border to spend the night and figure the rest out later.
Keep your imposing
El Alto feria sunglasses on while your uncertain eyes scan whatever new scene you’re trying to grasp to mask any of the solitary traveling gringa’s vulnerability. Take off the sunglasses when you need to
robarte a favor.
Deem your taxi driver trustworthy and let him take you around to five different hostels (and even spend five minutes talking to his friend who sometimes lets out the room in their family’s apartment, but they’re full this night) to see who has a room for you at a reasonable rate.
Try to read on the hostel’s patio, but only cringe at the conversation of an adjacent Santa Cruz twenty-something ramble on to two obliging Brits about surfing in northern California and how massive the swells are – so massive in fact that he himself is not yet good enough to ride them – his only consideration of his guests’ sensibilities being to convert wave heights into meters.
Buy a bottled water from the little Nicaraguan girl who’s bustling between the other vendors who’ve boarded the bus and chat with her about nail polish. While still chatting and French-braiding your already windswept hair in preparation for the next leg, have the guy outside mouth a toothy
"guapa" to you right before he hoists the massive spare tire on his shoulder and climbs up the ladder to the bus’s roof to secure it up there. Apply your new goldenrod shade to the one finger she lets you.
Arrive, plod from the bus station to the main plaza, then down the stretch to the lake. Sit and watch the lake.
Join a 30-something Granadino on the bench back in the central plaza and engage in a meandering conversation that begins with his wistful remark that “the plaza’s where you can always come and let your day – good or bad – unwind,” and that culminates with him extrapolating the power of the sea to how God and the devil made a deal that the former would relinquish control of the sea to the latter, pausing and going, “It’s like that movie with that big boat and the old lady who threw the necklace into the sea.” “Titanic?” you venture. “Yeah, that one.”
Eventually get up and go check into a hostel, cold shower off the stick and grime, and hit the sack not long after the sun does.
Wake up and head down to the plaza while the air's still cool. Buy two small styrofoam cups of coffee for 25¢ apiece from the vendor and her coolers and marvel Nicaraguan innovation.
Make a day trip to a couple markets with the Belgian hostelmate (born in Burundi and researching in Brazil for her doctorate in anthropology) and spend most of the time flitting between the three languages common to you both, never really settling on one in particular.
Go to the bar and listen to a Nicaraguan guy tell you that all the Tico men are metrosexuals who use product in the hair on their heads and shave the hair on their chests, all the while his blue dress shirt is unbuttoned down to the upper abdominals, exposing an inverted triangle with an estimated 24
* square inches of his own lush pectoral tresses.
*(8 x 6 / 2)
Follow that up with a conversation with an Aggie undergrad who is voting for Nader if ol' Ralph makes it on the Lone Star State’s ballot.
Be grateful you’re camping out at the spare hostel so you can twice enjoy a garden courtyard breakfast at the historic hotel named for the
national poet, complete with a carame
llo macchiato one day and a strawberry milkshake the next.
Pack up and head for the beach, because salt water beats fresh any day and you did not pack this swimsuit for naught.
Turn frustration at forgetting to charge your camera battery into resolve to better describe it for you all here.
Sit and wait at a dusty bus stop, on a bet that the person who gave you directions did in fact know what they were talking about and weren't simply proffering something to avoid letting you down by saying they didn't know what you need to do to get where you're going.
Find out the buses aren't running to the coast because it's Sunday and join three others in a cab (at one point, there would be seven people in the five-seater).
Eat
ceviche in the late afternoon on the deck overlooking the sunset on the beach with a Toña in one hand and O’Connor in the other.
Come back from the beach and let the saltwater dry taught across your cheeks while you sit on the deck in the hammock with the hollyberry print and hold the book closed in your lap while trying to pick out names for the colors of the bands in the sky as they morph in the twilight, settling on baby blue, florescent salmon, and stingray grey in the end.
Finish your book the next morning on the beach next to the dog and owner playing fetch while the rest of the town wakes up.
Fashion tortillas and litchis from the market into a breakfast for the bus. Buy a water from the brother of your
amiguita from the other day, then have her pass through your bus again, and repaint that same fingernail on the left-hand ring finger because the previous polish rubbed off.
Finagle your way through border Immigration by ignoring the first guy who tells you you have to go stand in the hour-plus line and smiling and asking the guy next to him if he could give you the exit stamp you need, which he does.
Spend two hours waiting to buy a ticket for the bus, or at least 116 minutes more than it would normally take, because it’s a holiday and barely a bus is running.
Ticket in hand, take the one hour until your bus leaves and find a small trail, follow it down to a wide, languid river, counting three blue morpheus butterflies along the way. Go down to the bank, prop one bag under your head and the other under your arm, lie down, and watch a boy with a build like Mowgli hop from rock to rock on the other side of the river.
Sprint your heart out for 200 meters when you find your bus is leaving because you got back in the wrong line (none of them marked) and missed the original boarding. Climb breathlessly aboard and realize one of the standing passengers has taken your seat, but since none of the seats is marked, relegate yourself to squeezing yourself in amid the other standing passengers and assuring yourself how refreshing the breeze that’s coming in and cooling off your sticky self is after the unanticipated aerobic activity, and think that you'd make a good Buddhist.
Think about either crying or reaching down to get your shoe – if you could get to it between the wedged mass of pudgy spare tires and booties – and use it to bop the head of the elderly woman who just laughed at you when you affirmed that you did in fact lose the seat you’d paid for and were going to have to stand up on this six-hour plus bus ride, and think that maybe you wouldn’t make such a good Buddhist.
Make your way up to the front at the next stop, explain your situation to the bus
ayudante, watch him give up his seat for the next half an hour until the next seated passenger gets off, and do not feel guilty about this while sitting for the remainder of the trip. At all.
Stare out the window as the light dims on the monolithic trees, draped in vines like Medusa's hair, that loom over the landscape and formulate phrasings, and mull phrasings like that as you think of things to post or send later.
Arrive back in your gristly, diesel-infused city after 32 hours traveling on 11 buses and four taxis in four and a half days with half a córdoba, no dollars, and just under 500 colones in your pockets and miss the solitude already.
"It is clear that such a man could not reach new countries, or add to his past experiences, if he went not along new and unknown roads and abandoned those which were known to him. Exactly so, one who is learning fresh details concerning any office or art always proceeds in darkness, and receives no guidance from his original knowledge, for if he left not that behind he would get no farther nor make any progress."
-sjdlc
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