Once you get lost, you might just find yourself.
So I’m in this beat-up bus, creaking and wheezing along like some geriatric love scene, sweating burst water balloons, smeared all over the back seat. Barely a month into my travels, bamboozled by an overabundance of baggage, I’m chasing waves on the back of a rumor and the heels of a storm.
Hauling my load into the back of the bus in the midday heat, surfboards and all, I caught the driver’s glare through the rearview mirror. He clearly didn’t like what he saw. We’d agreed beforehand that he’d tell me where to get off, so I felt relaxed enough to lean back and let my mind wander the glittering dreamscapes of my newfound freedom.
As it turns out, I wandered a touch too far, so when the driver slammed the bus to a halt beside a lonely tree and dusty path and shouted “Aqui esta, amigo,” I didn’t think twice – I grabbed my shit and in a clumsy thump, landed at the start of a diabolical and freakishly perplexing journey through a tropical abyss. There’s a schoolgirl standing in the shade of the tree, fixing me with an unequivocal stare that says “not many of your kind step off here.”
I point down the only road and ask her in my elementary Spanish, “It’s there for Barra de la Cruz?”
She nods, in a sense, but is still giving me that look.
“Where is the beach?” I ask her.
Given the entire western horizon is the Pacific Ocean, it’s probably not my best question, but there’s something in her stare that unnerves me, making me feel that I need to keep talking.
“How many minutes walking to the beach?”
“Ten.”
“Ten?”
“Yes.”
“Very good, thank you very much!” Ten felt a good answer to me.
What I now know is that when language fails you, it’s your ability to decode the vacant stare – and then act on it – that can make or break your mission. I can still hear the sound of my instinct screaming at me, but in the moment “ten” was all she needed to say to blind me, so I strapped up and hit the road, my grin of blissful stupidity restored.
About 100m later I reached a fork in the road. Just ahead are three old men on a porch. I walked over, working up a diabolical sweat already, feeling slightly awkward approaching them in that state… but best to double-up on directions and be sure, right?
“Good afternoon, gentlemen, which way for Barra de la Cruz?”
Big smiles, “Barra de la Cruuuuzzzz…” followed by this goddamn blank stare.
“Uuuhm…yes…Barra de la Cruz. I am a surfer, I am looking for the waves. Which way is the beach?”
“Ahhh, yes, yes…there.” He points down the left fork.
“There?” I point left, too.
He nods. They all smile and nod. It smells fishy as a motherfucker… but I thank them nonetheless and continue on my way.
About 15 minutes, in the sweat was pooling in my slops, my feet sliding straight off of them. I put shoes on. The first true fangs of doubt start to pierce my brain. I pulled half a bottle of water from my bag, stared at it, and then put it back in the bag.
I came over a rise to see the land arcing way off into the distance, with not a hint of civilization to be seen, save for one man walking across the hills with a TV on his head. It made little sense. I shouted across to him, “Helloooo! Which way to the hostels?” Without pause, he pointed to the beach and said, “Straight ahead!” The speed and confidence of his response restored my hope, and I could hear the ocean. So I kept walking. And walking. And walking.
45 minutes later, I was cursing that schoolgirl and the old man in a most shameful way. Vile things spilled from my mouth. It was too bloody hot and there was too little shade, so I swore and I shook my fists at the sun and the Gods.
The path then descended into the jungle, and for each foot it fell, the temperature rose a degree, or two. I was sweating so much my shorts were wet. Obviously, timing being the perfect beast it is, the path reached a swamp and disappeared completely. It was at this moment, staring into the slush, that I remembered what a good friend once said…never turn back. What goes in must come out.
So I was in up to my knees with two backpacks and a double-boardbag. Even the bugs were making their play and really, it was making no sense to me, but all I could do was keep moving forward. I emerged from the swamp in a filthy stink, and the sound of a pounding sea dragged me from the pungent jungle cave back into the rapist sun. I dropped everything in the sand, took a few short steps, splashed my face with my t-shirt and tried to absorb the unfathomable expanse of jungle. Beach and ocean stretched as far as I could see in either direction – and there was not one jiggly molecule of man to be seen. If it wasn’t so utterly demoralizing, it could’ve been quite beautiful.
There looked to be another path further down the beach, but what I found was something deeply chilling. The stench hit my nostrils long before I reached them – twenty, maybe thirty enormous turtle shells; the rotting remains of beautiful creatures that once were, now ripped apart by the vultures that eyeballed me from the trees above. They were massive, some of the shells easily a three feet wide. I felt nauseous. It was an ending unnecessarily macabre for creatures so tormented by nature. It was as if some ghoulish feast had taken place under the cover of darkness, something wholly unnatural. I couldn’t bear look at it.
Far down the beach, I spotted two kids fishing with a net in the shorebreak. I walked over to greet them, and they fixed me with that now-infuriating vacancy, as if they’d never seen a white man before. Maybe they hadn’t. In very straightforward Spanish, I asked them if they knew of a little village called Barra de la Cruz, a place with tourists like myself, people with surfboards, where travelers stayed in hostels. But they simply stared, saying nothing, almost as if they weren’t even thinking. Just… staring. The anger started to boil; I felt an urge to shout but realized how pointless, how arrogant that would be. I asked where the nearest village was, and one lifted his arm ever so slowly, pointing in a northerly direction. I thanked him and continued on my way.
By now, I was so bewildered it was becoming comical. My major concern was water, as I only had a few sips left by this point. That little witch in her school uniform disguise! Her ten minutes became two hours and I was undeniably a shitload further from my destination than when we met.
I kept plodding along, following a rising plume of smoke in the far distance – a sure sign of man. Another half hour or so later, through more jungle, across more pastures and pan-fried plains, I came across two rancheros.
