How to hang out at the beach without getting ANY sand between your toes

     After two weeks in Quito, Santi, a few friends, Chewy the killer Yorkshire Terrier and I decided to head to a friend´s apartment at the beach in Bahia for a long weekend. However, one thing was very clear. We absolutely could not leave until after the Ecuador/Costa Rica game and we had to be back before the next game. With this in mind, Santi and I packed our bags the night before and headed to Mati´s house (our chosen game watching venue since Ecuador´s first victory). Once there, we all donned our yet-to-be-washed jerseys (washing is not permitted between games) and began an all night vigil, which included  many games of Winning Eleven and constant vigorous debates over the possible outcomes of the following day´s game. Playstation  controls were thrown, arms were punched, silent treatments began and ended, and brief lessons in the highly developed art of Ecuadorian profanity were given free of charge throughout.  Somewhere in the midst of all this we made a truly stupid decision (from a foreigner´s point of view) and ordered Chinese take out.

     By 5:00AM I had semi-permanently camped in the bathroom and was carefully reevaluating the merits of the house special lo mein. Having been given estimates ranging from 6-10 hours for our coming road trip to the beach, I wondered if I would make it. By 8AM everyone else had arrived and taken up their game watching positions, but I was completely beat. I slept during some of the first half, awaking to the raucus cheers of of my companions as they jumped on the bed, banged on the walls, and screamed colorful things at the Costa Rican players in celebration of Ecuador´s goal. I got up, cheered, and took up my seat of honor in the bathroom. The final 3-0 result in Ecuador´s favor filled us all with hypothetical visions of the Ecuadorian team hoisting the solid gold Cup over their heads. I on the other hand was the only one with his own golden cup. Mati´s mom, upon hearing of my malady had taken it upon herself to make me a giant cup of scalding hot oregano tea, which, she said, would fix me up perfectly. It certainly tasted bad enough to be an effective medicine, and I drank it religiously as we packed into the little red minibus, which Santi´s driver had commandeered from his dad´s university, and began driving. Just in case, I took an Immodium, crossed my fingers, and did my best to fall asleep.

     I awoke some time later on what has to be the longest twistiest stretch of road I´ve ever seen. We were surrounded by thick fog that almost entirely obscured the line of five or six trucks and buses creeping along ahead of us. I looked at my watch and was pleasantly surprised to see that we had been driving for three hours. I turned to Santi and asked with rhetorical confidence, "So, we´re about halfway there, right?" "Well, no, not really," he responded, "I think we´ve still got about five or six hours." Something about the coombination of the frequency of his last words and a particularly sharp hairpin turn (which our driver took like Mario Andretti) made my stomach burble as I turned back around. For three more hours we continued down the the winding road. The all-too-common caravans of slow moving trucks and buses interupted our progress at times but our driver, whose nerves seemed to be hewn from the hardest stuff on Earth, routinely passed them on blind curves, honking the horn a couple of times and then pushing the van´s decrepit four cylinder beyond its limits. At these moments I found it difficult to decide which would be better: to remain alert and ensure that I would see an oncoming bus a fraction of a second before it plowed us over the thousand foot drop on the side of the road or to sleep and dream about it. I struck a fine balance and did some of both, but amazingly enough, the bus never came and the road eventually began to straighten out.

Shortly after the first substantial straightaway in hours, Jaime decided to stop at a gas station so that we could stretch and use the bathroom. It felt great to stand up straight and I instinctively followed everyone else to the bathrooms where I immediately found myself in a bit of a quandary. To risk unleashing what I had been working so hard to contain for the previous hours or to risk further discomfort by continuing to hold it? I opted for the latter and climbed back into the bus with my fingers crossed and a bottle of gatorade in hand.

Once on the road again, we began passing through palm and banana plantations, spotted here and there with clusters of wooden houses raised on stilts. Each of these small communities had adopted the same tactic to attract the attention and respect of passers-by: speed-bumps. These speed bumps, a number of which I am guilty of having helped build in the town where I did my homestay six years ago, are not your standard garden variety speed-bumps. Instead, these Chapas Acostadas ("sleeping cops" as Ecuadorian drivers so fondly refer to them) come in two equally lethal variations. The first (type 1) is something along the lines of a small launch ramp (not unlike those used by motorcycle stunt men), ranging in width from four to eight feet and soaring to a maximum height of about a foot. The only way to cross one of these is to drive almost completely sidways across it so as to avoid removing everything between the front and rear axles. The second (type two) is far smaller, being only about a foot wide and about six inches tall; however, because the people buiding this type almost never paint it or otherwise mark it, it demands respect in much the same way as a rattlesnake. Whereas a speeding driver unlucky enough to hit a type one Chapa must either already possess or suddenly discover the trick to flying a roaring exhaustless car, he/she who hits a type two Chapa with any significant speed will find  him/herself  carreening down the road in something resembling a bulldozer without a front axle. Fortunately for us, Jaime's Formula 1 reflexes allowed him to avoid dazzling us with his piloting/earth moving skills (of which I'm sure he had an ample amount) during our many many encounters with these booby-traps. Instead, he would slow to a crawl and deftly navigate the obstacles as the locals (having been alerted minutes before by the American rock music blaring through our minibus's one speaker) turned, stared, and, upon seeing us all decked out in our Ecuador gear, smiled, waved, and chanted the National Team's slogan "¡Si se pueden!" (Yes, they can!). I was not foolish enough to think that they were actually sharing a moment of mutual nationalistic pride with us. No, no, I knew that, in fact, they were cheering us on in mock admiration, watching intently as we attempted to dominate the single most important topographic feature of their village. Thanks to Jaime, we deprived each and every one of those people of the incredible satisfaction I am sure they would have gotten had our bus been crippled by one of THEIR Chapas. We did not, however, make it to the beach unscathed.

After an hour or two of mound-dodging antics, the road smoothed out again and we sped through a largly unpopulated area of rolling hills and gentle curves, not unlike the coastal hills of California. Then, suddenly after fifteen or twenty minutes, we came across a patch of road, about a hundred feet long, where it appeared as though someone had simply hacked out the pavement with a jackhammer or, perhaps more likely a pick axe, leaving nothing but a strip of dirt heavily studded with the football-sized stones Ecuadorians often use as fill for their roads. This strip was, of course, punctuated at either end by an abrupt two or three-inch-tall set of parenthesis where the pavement ended and began again. As Jaime crept through, trying to avoid the largest rocks, I thought, "Hmm looks like they're going to repave this section of road." Afterall, it looked just the way roads in the US look when one of those giant pavement munching machines grinds down the old asphalt to make it ready for a new layer of glass-smooth pavement. I continued to entertain the possibility as we arrived, about two miles down the road, at another such break in the pavement. Once again, we rolled slowly through, while our teeth and the van's sliding windows chattered loudly enough to drown out the sound of Axle Rose's voice. It was not until we came upon the fifth or sixth such break in the road that I began to realize tht the road was not in a state of repair. Instead, it dawned on me that these abrupt, rocky dirt strips were nothing more than a third form of Ecuadorian highway sabotage. Whereas the previously mentioned type  1 and 2 obstacles had been built up, these (type 3) had been dug out from the road. Furthermore, although these asphaltless strips did not provide the possibility of destruction by four wheeled flight or high speed earth moving, they depended on resonant frequencies to do their dirty work. Just as a fine crystal wine glass will shatter to pieces if exposed to a certain high-pitched noise, cars too have limits. This  factor comes into play sooner or later, depending on a given driver's patience. In our case, Jaime maintained his composure far longer than I might have and crawled through ten or fifteen of these rumble strips before giving in to the urge to carry a bit more speed through one of them. From my vantage point in the front seat, I thought we were in good shape as Jaime lined up with what seemed to be two nicely smoothed-out tracks in an upcoming dirt patch. However, about halfway through, going about thrity miles an hour, a bump jostled the van from the worn path and we sped headlong into the heart of the potholed expanse. To my utter astonishment, the windows did not simply shatter or fall out and I began to take a breath in anticipation of the relative quiet of the pavement on the far side. My sigh was cut short as we careened  simultaneously into a deceptively deep pothole and the edge of the pàvement. At that moment a tremendous howl burst fourth from beneath our seats. The sound was so loud that my sigh was instantly tranformed into an "OOOOHHHHUUUU!!!!" which I accompanied with a grimace. I looked over at Jaime and back at Santi, who I think had been sleeping. Both wore the sort of scrunched up, anguished, I-hope-nobody-sees-me -making-this-face,  expression one might expect to see at a particularly savage boxing match.   

As Jaime pulled over, we all looked back to see the entire exhaust (from the engine all the way back) crumpled in the road at the end of the dirt patch. "Shit," I muttered, at once fantasizing about a bathroom and imagining a crowd of exstatic Ecuadorians pouring out of the rodside folige to celebrate the felling of their latest victim. We had been on the road for a little over eight hours and the sun slowly disappeared as Jaime and Chamba slithered around in the dirt under the van doing their best to reattach the pipe with a few scraps of spare wire. Twenty minutes later, we were back on our way, roaring ahead with such appauling volume that, for once, we were all most certainly as irritated as the people whose homes we passed.

After a deafening hour, we finally reached the shoreline and pulled into a gas station. Jaime asked around for a repair shop and we belched and blasted our way down the road to a dark house. We got out amidst a mess of various welding torches, gas tanks, and random pieces of pipe. Jaime knocked at the door. A couple of tries later, a shirtless man came to the door looking half-asleep and not particularly happy to see us. Jaime chatted him up for a bit, after which he put on shirt and proceeded to weld our exhaust back on. Forty minutes later, in the pitch blackness of a cloudy coastal night, we set off again on what I assumed were to be the last twenty or thirty minutes of our epic journey. Once again, I was entirely wrong.

An hour and change later, we could finally see the strip of lights marking Bahia. From there it was simple. All we had to do was catch a ten minute ferry across the bay and we'd be at the apartment. As we pulled up to the wharf, the clock in the van read 10:32. "Where was the ten thirty ferry?" we asked a man walking by. "Oh," he responded, "they cancelled that one tonight, last one left at nine thirty." As if to prepare me for a final exam, a late-night review session in Ecuadorian  profanity ensued. I even chimed in with a few of my selected favorites from the previous night (none of which are remotely appropriate for publication) and felt better having done so. After a short discussion we decided that our only option was to find a boat taxi and have Jaime spend the night there and cross on the ferry in the morning. After some intense bargaining, we secured ourselves spots on the next boat for fifty cents a person and we were on our way.

Upon our arrival on the far side of the bay, we took cabs to the point of the peninsula and rode the elevator up to Mati's apartment. Having spent the day sweating in my already ripe Ecuador jersey, the cool blast of air conditioning which greeted me at the door spurred me to let loose a giddy, if slightly maniacal, chuckle. I dropped my bags, took off my shoes and poured myself into one of the lounge chairs on the balcony.        

Sorry for the abrupt ending, the story is not over and I´ll be back soon to finish it, thanks for reading