Avalanche

Sunday 7 March
Quito – San Vincente – Canoa

I wake up. It’s dark still. The bus has stopped. I’m not sure what’s going on. I can’t get back to sleep.

2.00 am
I go for a piss. There are many other buses and lorries parked alongside us. Something’s going on.

3.00 am
I ask someone what’s happening. I’m sure he uses a word like “lavina” which is German for avalanche. Which is strange given that he was speaking Spanish. I guess that there’s been an avalanche that is blocking the road. His hand movements seemed to suggest it too.

4.00 am
I buy a beer from a random roadside shack that happens to be open. I smoke a cigarette, listen to my binaural beats tape and manage to fall asleep again.

6.00 am the bus starts moving. It’s light now and I see that there has been a fairly large mud slide that had covered the road, and a digger has managed to clear a single lane through it. There’s a big queue on the other side. It has been raining heavily, and it’s still spitting it down outside.

9.00 am we arrive in San Vincente. I get off the bus and try to find the bus to Canoa. I get to where I understand is the stall for the company that has the bus that goes there. The guy behind the desk is a big, fat, waste of space that looks like Jabba the Hutt. He doesn’t tell me much, and it seems he could really give a shit either way. I stand there for about 15 minutes feeling bored and being lazily attacked by flies. I notice that there are loads of tuk-tuks going past, so rather than continue to be bored I decide to take one. I get to Canoa for $5.

One thing I’ve noticed on this trip is that compared to previous trips, I’ve been allowing myself to get more wound up and worried about various things than I have in the past. It’s strange. I think it’s partly due to having high expectations of the levels of comfort I could afford out here – and I can afford a nice level of comfort. It’s perfectly adequate, I’ve just been allowing the small things to get in the way. The other thing is that I don’t have Doctor James to do my worrying for me. Having someone who worries more than you do is a great foil for allowing you to see the opposite opinion and deciding which is better. So it’s a shame he isn’t here with me!

But on this bus trip I think I have overcome that. It was a crap bus, there were delays, things weren’t ideal. But I knew it didn’t matter. I knew when I got to Canoa I could sleep as much as I wanted and recover from any problem that might have happened on the trip. Plus the bus was $7.50 so I had saved money there.

I arrive in Canoa and find a room and sort myself out. I go to buy some board shorts as frankly the swimming trunks I have aren’t cutting it out here. And they get dirty really easily. I find some for $15 which is cheap though they’re not a big brand name.

It’s Sunday. Everywhere is closed. I relax. It was raining in the morning and cloudy now, so there’s not many people around. In the evening I meet two girls Abbie and Maggie who are from just outside Detriot at the hotel bar. We have a chat and get on well. Some of the local surfer dudes have lit a fire on the beach. We go and join them. They wanna get with the girls desperately, it’s good fun to watch. Eventually I go to bed, with helicopters.