This is entirely non-football related... just an update from my son who spent part of the summer in Costa rica completing his degree requirements and is now roaming around Central America with his wife! Great way to spend post graduation, especially given that after high school he spent three months in Europe!
Of Biblical Proportions
Hey, remember when I said that we were going to have a really
uneventful day riding at least 4 buses? Well I don't think I have ever
been more wrong about anything in my life. We took a bus up the coast to
Puntarenas, a tiny little town on an even tinier spit of land jutting
out towards nicoya peninsula, transferred to a city bus back to the
mainland, and got off on the Pan American Highway only to cross I-5's
southern sister on foot. From there we caught a standing-room only bus
to the border. The border that's 3 hours away. Thank goodness we were
able to snag seats after a rest stop.
After the trip to the border, on which we met an aged punk rocker
from Seattle, we had to find our way across the negligently planned no
man's land between the borders. Welcome to Nicaragua! We were sweaty and
tired, we'd just spent 6 hours on buses, and it's only 3pm.
Thinking the rest was smooth sailing is where my complete wrongness
began to show. The bus from the border was a three-hour affair on an old
converted school bus with a homebrew paintjob and no air conditioning.
As well as no passenger limit. Somewhere along the 4-7pm ride it got so
full that people just started holding on to the back of the bus. The bus
that wouldn't even come to a full stop for them to board. I guess
that's what you get for a $2 bus ride halfway across the country.
As we pulled in closer to Managua the rain began to pour. As we
pulled into the stop in Managua we realized that the streets had turned
into rivers. And that due to the literal flood that had begun there were
no more buses to León, and we were left with finding a hostel in a less
than safe city. At night. And forfeiting our reservation. Or paying the
cab driver to take us two hours north to our hostel. So, managing to
silence my inner miser, I took out money from an ATM and asked our
Nicaraguan hero to take us to León.
All joking aside though, our driver, whose name I never even learned,
is probably the most generous person I've encountered here. The roads
were far from safe, lightning was striking less than a mile from where
we were and the rains made it nigh impossible to see the road at times.
In between bouts of mortal fear I found time to explain in broken
Spanish exactly how much we appreciated what he was doing for us. He
even drove around León asking where to find our hotel for no extra
charge. Nevermind how bad we felt when he told us that he'd have to wait
out the rest of the night in León until the storm passed, leaving him
over 1000 km from his family in the midst of a biblical tempest. If I
were a god-fearing man I'd consider him a guardian angel, but I feel he
deserves more credit than that. He was simply an incredibly caring man
who went out of his way to help two stranded gringos when he didn't have
to.
I couldn't help but to hug him when we finally parted ways, and I don't think he expected that.
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