We were driving fast out of the city in a gas-powered car. A seventy-mile-long drive lay ahead, snaking into the deep jungle. The other cars gradually melted away and were replaced by large animals darting past the headlights from the thickets.
We arrived in the ghost town of M. at 1am. The driver set off quickly and we were left standing in total darkness, listening to the low rumble of the jungle, while stray dogs brushed past our shins. A low blue brick building that stood on the corner of town seemed to match the address of our hostel. The door was locked. We knocked, after an anxious trade of questions, and heard nothing back. We began looking into the windows around the house and saw one of them was ajar. Just inside a girl's head lay sleeping. As soon as I peeked into the window her eyes opened and she looked directly at me and smiled. After some time we managed to explain to her in broken Spanish how we had come to the town to find the whole place completely empty, with no lights on, as though the whole place had been abandoned years ago. If she would be so kind as to let us in we would be in her debt. We slept on the first beds we could find inside, joined by a huge old black dog that shuffled around the room all night growling. TW reminded me that there was also a huge parrot inside the house, seemingly asleep standing up. Birds have quite a strong smell when you are close to them, and it's coming back to me as I write this. When I woke the dog was gone and the girl was nowhere to be found. We made the usual excursions - some waterfall or other - and returned to town in the evening. I greatly enjoy being in nature but I have little facility for writing about it without becoming either morbid or quite saccharine. Imagine it yourself, you know what it feels like.
That evening we returned to M. and floated into the only bar in town. I struggle with meeting people and was on a bad turn having been introduced to some more of them over the day. I sank into scorn and misery. Sat on the next table was one of the most foul and disgusting men I have ever met. He was called Reiss, spelled that way, and had introduced himself by asking me if I'd recently seen "a blonde bird with big tits" hanging around town. Later in the evening I saw the girl in question rejecting his advances as he whined like a puppy. The discussion around our own table was about how much more authentic this place was than London, how cheap, how livable, how honest. I was not in the mood and said nothing to show my agreement. I was asked about my degree and obliged although I could see the jaws shifting around me.
I went to stand on the balcony and saw a shape coming out of the low blue hostel door.
I could hear feet shuffling along the dirt road. It was the girl from the night before. She came and stood below me and smiled upward. She was N., she told me. I introduced myself and invited her to join us, at which point the flow of conversation around the table became instantly stunted because of our exceptionally loose grasp of Spanish. After not too long we moved across to google translate:
P. was a town not unlike Glastonbury or Stroud for those who have been, except that it is set against the backdrop of the extreme violence of the jungle and of the society that surrounds it. It's a place people go to access a frayed fantasy world where money is of little importance as long as you definitely always have it. It worked on me though, for all my cynicism. We stayed in a small set of adjacent rooms in an apartment complex near the center of town. TW left after a few days and continued up the coast. I was left to roam with N. It can happen if you want, she said. She kept calling me John Lennon, but I'm not John Lennon. She couldn't actually say it in her accent and it came out as Eyon Jennong. I always preferred McCartney anyhow.
Within a few days, I was desperate for TW's return. The girl had now become an apparition that followed me everywhere, spawning on the street corner outside my room and cooing. I will come to London... I felt my head sinking into my neck. I bought a bus ticket to the Rio B. as soon as TW showed up again. I hadn't slept much at all. N. walked us up to the main road, and as lorries screamed past she softly croaked mi viajero perdido as she adjusted my black cowboy hat. I smoked a cigarette that I really didn't want and then got on the bus. The door hung open as we drove.
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