The Trail of Tears

Our bus to Oaxaca ("Wuh-hock-uh" if you are reading this aloud to your children) is actually a whie Volvo mini-van that seats (well, officially) fourteen.  From past experience in Guatemala, these vans actually aren´t a bad way to travel - they´re affordable, quick and direct and much more personable than those huge first class space buses.  Sometimes called colectivos or simply "tourist buses", they are predominately ridden by gringos.  This bus is costing us $120 pesos each for the six hour drive to the steamy town of Pochutla where we will than have to find onward travel for the last 40 kilometers or so to the beach town of Zipolite, our day´s final destination.  Before we depart, as I sit in the little dilapidated store front that serves as a bus terminal, I barely catch this little footnote in our guidebook:

"Pochutla... is 245 km away by the curvy Highway 175... Drivers will usually stop when you need a bathroom break, or want to take photos (or vomit, as some people tend to do on this route)."

Hmmmm.  Vomit.  What??

As our packs are strapped to the roof´s luggage rack I make one last stop to the, ahem, bathroom.  This one is a dank, greasy stall in what looks like a back alley in Baghdad. 

With no toilet paper.  But of course I don´t discover that little fact until it is too late.  To avoid an awfully uncomfortable bus ride, I very briefly consider "recycling" some of the paper in the bin beside the toilet.  My standards of sanitation have plummeted in only three short weeks.  But even I am too proud to wipe myself with someone else´s poo stained paper, so I tear a sheet out of my notebook, fold it up, and take care of business.  This is my life.

I am looking forawrd to relaxing on the beach, catching up on my writing, and otherwise do nothing for a few days.  But first we have to get there...

The ride starts innocently enough out of Oaxaca, south through the Valles Centrales.  The scenery is dull, more landscape parched by the dry, hot season, lots of dusty little bored villages, the occasional pack mule ambling on its way to market.  A bit further outside the city the road begins to deteroriate.  Its about 40 percent paved, as if someome started to build a road, got tired along the way, and then just stopped.  There are whole 5 kilometer stretches that have been recently paved with black top, smooth and level.  And then, without warning, the road dissolves into pot holes, pebbles and sand, sending the van into a series of jolts, wobbles, and un-shockabsorbed thwumps!

William, happily dozing next to me, is blissfully unaware.  Then the road starts to twist and turn, winding back and forth, around itself, up and down, over, under, ninety degree hairpin turns.  The driver is a maniac.  He whips the van around the impossible curves at alarming speeds.  Sheer drops of hundreds of feet greet us on each side.  No railings here.  Just prayers.  Cars and vans (and sometimes mules and pedestrians) are on the opposite side of the road coming down from the mountains, driving equally as crazy.  Our driver plays an insane game of chicken as he passes a slow moving vehicle in our lane, only to meet another white van now barreling down at us head on on the left side of the road.  William is awake by now - only a corpse could sleep though this - and at first we are laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.  It is kind of fun.  Like a rollercoaster.  A rollercoaster about to shoot off the tracks.  I am grabbing on to the seat belt strap hanging above my head, white knuckling it the whole way.  The turns are dramatic, severe, sharp.  We are two wheeling it at times, Dukes of Hazard style, mostly riding on the wrong side of the road until another car approaches and we screech adn whip suddenly back into the right lane, all at 60 miles per hour.  Oh, and the driver is on his cell phone.  With one hand on the wheel.

The lush, green mountain scenery would be beautiful if we were not flirting with disaster.  I try to write in my journal but I can´t keep the words on the page.  Words like: absurd, harrowing, kamikazee, death wish, nauseating, stomach churning (by now, William is lying supine in the rear of the van, trying not to loose his breakfast), death-defying, trail of tears...  We stop briefly at a roadside rest stop (hut?  shack?) where we all tumble out of the van, sweating and laughing, happy (and shocked) to be alive.  In hindsight, we should have stayed there.  I could have got a job cleaning out the thirld world toilets and perhaps William could have showed them how to make a real cup of coffee.  Instead, we re-boarded the death-mobile and continued to tempt fate for a few more hours, stopping periodically on the side of the road to pick up more passengers, cramming in stick-thin locals and their heavy wares until there was no room to move and no air to breathe. 

We finally made it out of the mountains and into the lowland tropical forests, dotted by coconut palms, tangles of hanging vines, and deep red hibiscus.  It was a glorious sight.  Welcome to Pochutla.  Our bus mercifully goes no further. 

And if that road is the only way back, we plan to live here foreeevvverrrrrrr!