There was this time - writing class final

Dreams of Beasts

There was this time, I went to the doctor even though I wasn’t sick or anything. And you have to know that I am cheap. I don’t like spending money on things that might or might not be useful. Giving it to doctors is the worst thing I can imagine. But there is this exception, what I went to the medic for: I am now vaccinated against rabies. And it’s not exactly free: seventy bucks. The cost of a plane ticket from Paris to Istanbul.

We did not take the plane though. Hitchhiking is so much more interesting, and cheaper. It is actually better than cheap, because you are basically being paid to travel, paid with free meals, coffees, warm beds, showers, and of course, rides. I won’t even get into the whole meeting- incredible-people thing, that’s not my point.

So here we are, rushing by night on one of the few highways of Slovenia, 135 miles an hour, four days only after our departure from Paris. The two young drivers are overexcited and sleepy, thanks to many hours (days ?) of driving and a pack of Redbull, now lying crushed dead at our feet. Hopefully the extra-loud heavy grunge underground Eastern metal music will keep the driver awake, and us alive. Zagreb, the Serbian capital, passes us by, but we decide not to stop there: the sea is calling us. We made it – quicker than we planned – into Croatia, it is nearly mid- night and the night is incredibly warm after the cold days we had in Vienna, where we had to shelter into those warm cafes around delicious pastries and hot chocolates. We are excited and want to push it to the Adriatic sea, juste a couple of hours away. But the gas station where our two tired drivers left us is dead empty. The only soul around is a fat cashier who doesn’t even seem to have a car. Intrigued at how he got here, and having nothing better to do, we go around the small grocery store looking for his car. Their was a car indeed, but a couple was standing by it. accept to take the three of us after a few minutes of hesitation: it is not that easy to catch a ride after midnight.

No music on the radio, neither much of a discussion: they speak only Croatian, we don’t. It is warm and silent, the highway is empty except for a few trucks that we drive by carefully. Who knows if they are not watching TV, drinking, showering, getting dress, or simply eating as

they drive. Or simply taking a leak in one of those empty plastic bottle that they then throw by the window and only hitchhiker and highway patrols can admire.

We are a short distance from the city we want to stop in, but our drivers are going way further, they don’t want to make a detour. Not like that old lady who made a u-turn just to take us to the next town, in Spain

– on another trip, another experience, another story-. So it is decided, with our forced consent: the car stops on the emergency lane of the four times four-way and let us out. We feel a bit like cheap prostitutes thrown away from a truck cabin. The honking and flashing trucks passing us

by add some authenticity. But we made it, nearly five hundreds miles in one day. We can see the city lights not too far away, but the industrial area where we are is pure tranquility for a not-so-legal camping site. We have been warn by friends: don’t camp in the wild or you’ll get fined and it won’t be a pretty one. Of course we know better, avoiding law issues

is our speciality. We walk a bit to find the best spot, and find it: a nice patch of grass, crispy dry like everything else in this god forgotten land. The grass is high as my hips in some places: no one will notice us here. A friend and I agree that it is warm enough, late enough, to sleep without tents for tonight. My other friend hesitate, she tell us about the beasts that must proliferate in this kind of high-grass place. We laugh at her. It’s not exactly the Amazonian jungle and its snakes and scorpions and spiders. No worries: the sky is beautiful, we have never seen so many stars, so bright against the space-vacuum, so dark. She surrenders, too lazy to put up a tent anyway and we just lay down in our open sleeping bags, falling asleep like well-fed babies.

Someone grabs my arm, pushes me. I wake up, blurry shapes shouting around me. I turn on my flashlight. There is blood. There is crying. I can see my friend holding a tissue up her nose. It soon turns red, but I can still see the printed painting by Klimt on the tissue, sou- venir of the last museum we visited in Vienna. Something just bit her in the face. What was it ? Nobody knows. She was sleeping when the teeth went through her nostril. A snake ? A bat ? A spider ? A mouse ? Somme kind of rabbit ? I don’t want to alarm her, but I can’t keep it for myself: there might be venom, and she has been bitten in the face, we

have to hurry. My other friend jumps at her, and starts sucking the blood out of her nose. She spits it in the grass. Her lips are red, she looks like a soap-movie vampire. In two minutes, our sleeping bags and things are stuffed roughly in our backpacks. There is no time to waste. A road, or

at least a dirt path. Incredibly, a car is coming. It stops, mainly because

I am standing in the middle of the road, swinging by arms up in the air, blinded by the car’s lights. He must come from the nightclub we saw

on our way. We try to explain the situation, but the driver is drunk, not interested, and afraid of this trio coming from the bushes in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. It is two in the morning. He left within few seconds, and we are alone again. Hopefully one of us remember the number to call the emergencies. I dial it and get a woman speaking in what must be Croatian. I finally have someone speaking a few words of English after a couple of endless minutes. They ask my our location. I look at my friends, one still bleeding, holding up her nose and tears, the other ones desperately looking around for a sign. There it is. We are not far away from a glowing pink motel sign. It seems to be enough for the rescue team. By the time we got to the meeting point, we keep wondering: what bit her ? Maybe a scorpion. But she would be all puffy or red or dead or something by now, wouldn’t she ? An ambulance appears after a short time. A very quick look by a doctor and we jump, all of us, in the ambulance. Flashes of red, flashes of blue. The streets

are quite empty. Our first visit of this seaside city has to be through an ambulance window. We don’t know where we are going, sometimes you just have to go with the flow. We stop in front of a small dark building, in what seems like a maze of barely larger-than-the-ambulance paved streets. No one’s awake in there. A woman finally shows up and let us in a small doctor’s office. She asks us many questions... in Croatian. It was too good to be true: you can have someone – more or less – speaking English on the phone, but don’t expect the doctor to be as accessible. And don’t count on those high-school language knowledges of yours: altogether, the three of us can speak French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian. Useless. The travel notebook is not too buried in my backpack, a pen follows. After five minutes of Pictionary-like sketches and an unnecessary amount of gesticulations from the three of us, she seems to understand the situation we are in. We let our wounded friend

with the doctor. She cleans the blood of her face: two small red dots ap- pear on the left nostril. It seems like the teeth went all the way through, since you can see the two tiny holes inside the nostril as well. A real vampire attack. The verdict is clear: rabies vaccine right now.

But one shot is not enough. That’s the beauty of vaccine, they make you wait for your fear of needles to come back before you have to show up again and get another shot. I checked our calendar: next shot was due in Bulgaria, and the next and last one in Istanbul, the day of my birthday. We spend the few hours left of the night sleeping -in our tents- on the football field right outside a tall silent hospital building.

The sun showed up again after this long night. We went to the beach, one of us her nose protected by a big bandage. And we laughed and laughed again at whatever beast attacked our campsite the night before. That is when I made up my mind: just in case, when I come back, I’ll get myself some rabies shots. That’s what I did.

Just in case.

Fifty Camels

There was this time when someone told me he would give me fifty camels for the friend I was traveling with. After a short hesitation (only fifty ?), I politely declined.

Morocco is a nice country. Nice people and all. But of course, each and every tourist is just another walking-wallet that the local people prey on as soon as it gets of the plane. And there is not much you can do, really, to avoid being harassed, unless you have the budget of Michael Jackson and can change your physical appearance for each and every country you visit, trying to fit in more discretely. I can’t afford to change the color of my skin, I am as white as the washer standing in front of me as I am writing this. So here I am, wandering by the streets of Marrakesh with two friends of mine, trying not to pay attention as the camel offers and other marriage proposal. I am not even that pretty, believe me.

We are looking for the historical Jewish area and, according to our printed map, it should be around somewhere. Jewelry shops: we are on the right track. Someone in the street offers his time to show us around. We don’t want to pay anything, but he insists: he is doing that for free, he is one of the organizer of the reconstruction of an old Jewish synagogue. We accept after a short talk between the three of us: whatever happens, we are not going to pay him if he asks us to at the end. How naïve can people be !

We follow him into the small streets, the narrow corridors that separate the red buildings. We enter a house. It is a wonderful sight: the light flows from the open central area onto the delicate colorful mosa- ics on the walls, on the floors. It is in bad shape, but the green plants running on the walls gives it an even more dream-like feeling. A hand- ful of kittens appears between the shadows of a stairway. Followed by their mother, skinny grey cat with a collar. Followed by a tall stiff man, a stick in his hand. Our guide explains to us that he is the guardian of this place, and we have to pay him something to thank him for letting us visit this heavenly place. We look at each other: we knew it, we have been trapped one more time. We reluctantly hand out a bit more than half the price he asked us. It is not much, but being force to pay seems

always like a high price.

We keep going, following our guide. It is a real maze, the walls

are higher than ever, the light barely reaches the dusty paths that runs in every direction.We feel like mice following the smell of cheese, knowing that the trap will close on us at some point.

The guide, after some pointless information about the surroundings, shows us the Jewish cemetery through the bars of small windows in a small corridor. A friend of his follows us. The streets are empty in this area, the day is beginning to fade into a bright night, the moon already showing up above our heads.

Our little group stops in a dead-end street. People are watching us from the windows. The guide announces our fate: people are “recommended” to give the equivalent of twenty dollars each to help the recon- struction of all those nice places we had the chance to see. We literally can not escape, the men blocking the only way out. We don’t even have the slightest idea of where we really are in this limitless city. I am glad that I am not alone but with my two friends, one of which is a man. Af- ter what seems to be two hours of bargaining, we surrender and give the man most of the money we have left in our wallet. He finally shows us the way out, the main street where we met him just two corners away. We thought we were not stupid tourists, but travelers of the world. What fools we were !

Stuck on a boat

There was this time in South America. Peru, more precisely.

It was towards the end of my summer trip: I had to take a boat on the Amazon river to reach a city because no roads were reaching it. I arrived in the departure city past midnight, after jumping on and off overcrowd- ed buses. I asked around to late drinkers by the riverside for informations concerning the next leaving boat. After three back and fro at the same spot, I finally found the right one. Young people were loading tons of shipment onto it, carrying sacs on their bare shoulders, sweating in the sticky night. I found someone claiming to be the captain in person, even though according to my believes, he should have worn a captain hat, at least (and scars across is sunburnt face and maybe a wooden leg,

a parrot, something along those lines). He didn’t have a hat, nor hair on his head (but more than enough coming from the neck of his t-shirt. The boat was supposed to leave at 9 PM the next day and last three to four days, but I could already hang my hammock on the second deck, saving me a hostel’s night. Which I did, after bargaining for a hammock until

I got it for three times less than the first told price. It was a long day, watching people coming on board, installing their hammocks with their families, their friends, swinging in those thread beds.

It didn’t left at 9PM. It didn’t move anywhere that night. “In the morning”, someone said. Clouds of mosquitos ruled the place, attracted by the huge spotlights of the ship and the warm blood of both gringos and Peruvianos. There is barely enough space inside for all the ham- mocks: the tiny free space I had with my neighbors was filled with two more swinging people, and another row was forming above our heads, Amazonian kind of bunk beds. The rest of the crowd is directly on the floor, beneath us.

No movement in the morning. Rumor has it it should be leaving in the afternoon. The two hundred people and myself start to feel fooled by this bald captain. We obtain some food after nearly fighting for it. I miss the free distribution of Inca Cola while I am taking a shower, the later being water pumped from the river into a spider-full small cabin -which is, obviously, also hosting the toilets-. The boat finally departs after lunch. The

hint of wind created by our slow speed is a relief after those days waiting like dogs locked in cars under a tropical sun.

The water level is very low. It is my first time around but every- one can see the river banks showing the fifteen feet of mud below the grass level. But it is the mighty Amazon, and we are just a big but flat- bottom boat. More than two hundreds people on the three decks of boat, but only five of us gringos. And tens of live chicken on the lowest deck standing for food supplies.

We stop as soon as the sun goes out: the water is apparently too low to go by night. The mosquitos come back as soon as the boat stands still. Nothing like killer slaps on bright red sunburnt skin.

The day after, more and more people come on the boat at each stop we make in those tiny lost pueblos. We go down the river by zigzag- ging from one bank to the other one, trying to stay in the deepest places. We are going slower and slower.

My after-lunch nap is interrupted by people talking louder than usual on the deck outside. I join them to observe the sinking ship a short distance from our position. One can see a quarter of her standing at 30° out of the water. Titanic all over again, but with 95°F out there, and no string quartet. We are still going on, but every one starts to fear the worst. The captain has to perform extensive manoeuvrings for each curve of the river.

We hit something. It looks like we are stuck. The mothers start putting life-jacket at their children, and around themselves as well: I would

learn later on that most of those people, even though living side by

side with rivers, never learnt of to swim. The captain pushes the motor through whatever is blocking us. Three hours later, we are as far as a few feet down the river. The night is falling. I decide to quit the overloaded inner-deck, with its double level of hammocks and the kids on the floor, and joined the upper-deck gang. Gringos and penniless travelers, their hammocks swinging in the refreshing wind. Of course there is no more room for me under the shadow of the captain cabin, I have to swing were the sun hits hard. Tropical places around noon can be hot as hell. My nose has no more skin for some time now, peeled off by a different sun: the one from the high summits of the Andes that I just came from. Fortunately, I manage to train my ugly useless gift-from-daddy hat for a

nice american baseball cap from my former hammock neighbor. I still feel like I can feel some kind of skin cancer developing in the middle of my face.

We don’t move for the next three days. The sinking boat by our side is still half out of water, but it is not literally sinking down.

Shouts on the upper-deck. A boat is coming, it looks like ours but a bit smaller. It is the boat that left four days after us and it is catch- ing us back. Our boats are tied together with the thickest ropes I have ever seen. The motors splash water around, the engines make horrible noises. But we are moving again. We go slower than ever before. Our dual-boat and its three hundreds inhabitants bring out each and every child living on the riverbanks. The same children that jump on the boats before they are even still with baskets full of fishes, fruits, sodas and homemade cakes. A nice change to the everyday rice and beans with chicken bits that we get after waiting in line for half an hour three times a day.

When night falls and the boats stop, red nose clowns from Argentina show up and entertain the bunch of us in exchange of thrown coins and claps and laughs. We have to keep the other boat by our side because our direction machinery broke while manoeuvring in the sand- bank. We stopped for a night at Nueva York, not exactly sky-scrapper and yellow cabs, but very nice nonetheless. We finally hit the final desti- nation.

Iquitos and its half a million inhabitants, where I share two moto-taxis with my new friends from Germany and Japan to celebrate our arrival around a beer at the cheapest hostel we could find.

It took ten days but gave me great new friends and incredible meetings, among them the pink dolphins swimming by our sides now and then, and the parrots flying above us in a loud dialogue. New card games, new addresses in my notebook.

I wonder if it would be the same in a train stuck for ten days back in Europe.