The Stupendous Tedium of Adventure

I remembered early on in our journey through the southernmost Central American country the stupendous tedium of adventure. The balance of dread and surprise, the fact that endurance merits comfort, that the hair stank of ugliness eventually becomes beautiful, vivid, dreamlike. Sometimes it's the other way around, sometimes it happens erratically, like the score of a well matched basketball game. Bliss - 10, Horror - 8, then suddenly Bliss - 10, Horror - 22, and you feel like the players, all of them at once, running back and forth across the court, downtrodden with exhaustion, sweaty from brow to ankle, keeping up.

You stand in front of a park near the city center, waiting for a local bus, and the town loco decides to harrass you with his rye-stinking breath, strange white paint on his chin and forehead, a small radio blasting in his hands, dancing suggestively at you with dozens of onlookers laughing, not helping - egging, not shooing. The moment you see his backside, pants nearly all the way down, white underware soiled with brown, you gag and your companions do too, so you decide to hail a cab instead. Any price, just to get you out of there. The cabbie in turn, ends up playing Tina Turner's "What's Love Got To Do With It" and you all screame it out the windows and at each other, despising one loco local and loving another, as he asks you in Spanish what the lyrics of the song mean.

You endure an 8 hour midnight bus ride from the capitol city to the beach, wearing sandals and shorts, a tanktop and a book. You pretzel yourself in a way that is warmest, as the air conditioner pours icy pockets of deathly friged air onto your bare skin, rendering the idea of a full night's sleep (or any sleep at all) impossible. But the bus ride from a freezing hell brings you to a boat, then, which takes you to a remote island in the Pacific, where equator-hot sunlight dances across your face through the leaves of the mangroves and the palms, and you sleep among howler monkeys, preying mantus' and a salty breeze in a hammock, swinging happy and free.

You spend the morning in a touristy island town dodging haggling boatmen, trying to give you the "best deal" to go to the "best beach," trying to bring them down a few bucks and being laughed at by open mouths and toothy grins. You get through it though, and somehow, for a dollar and fifty cents, you are taken to an island far away from the rest of the foreigners, and you find yourself bathing in a clear, coral surrounded pool of Caribbean water, eating the mangoes that you found on your forest walk to paradise. You lay back in the water and take in the absolute blue of the sky, the rustling perfect green of the trees, and the warm glassiness of your worldly tub. And life is good.

You stand in line at a bus terminal in the middle of the country among dozens of people with skin darker than yours and you are plucked out of the crowd, taken to the newest and fastest moving bus, you step on with an embarrassment of luck, that you get special priority because you are white, that you're treated differently because they want to ensure foreigners contentment and comfort. You realize that what this actually means is that you'll have a nice, squashy seat that reclines and lulls you into a dreamy catnap, until the first stop an hour later and then you'll be moved to a little narrow hallway in the front of the bus, accompanied by a family of five - your legs taking on yogic shapes and your feet falling asleep under you. You realize that you are a stowaway, you are extra money to them, paying cargo, cattle. But the bus will eventually take you to a city that has an airport that has airplanes with wings that will fly you quietly and comfortably Home, where you will peel this adventure off like a big backpack off an aching back, like sunburned skin from a shiny shoulder, only to get ready to do it all over again.