Motorcycle Troubles

Well, I’m home. In a span of a day, I went from shopping in a grocery store to collecting rainwater in buckets. I missed my little house on the matu. I knew that I wouldn’t get through the normalcy and comfort of Regionals without paying for it somehow, and the trip home was definitely the payment. I’ll summarize by saying that our bus broke down on the way back in the middle of nowhere, and it took an excruciating 30 hours (spent in the hot sun, or on the hotter bus) to get home. I slept on a bus that had a community of roaches. I felt them crawling on me when they turned off the lights in the bus to conserve the battery.

This morning I went to the market with Renee, and I decided not to go home. Instead, I sent him back with the bread that we bought for lunch, and walked towards the mountains. After I explored an abandoned Portuguese mansion, and almost got caught in a web the size of my bed, inhabited by a spider the size of my hand, I walked back onto the path to see the Bangladeshi loja owner who is pursuing me pretend to have motorcycle troubles a few feet down the road. He must’ve seen me exploring in the overgrowth. I turned him down for company - you can’t climb a rock hill with a motorcycle – but was glad that he stopped.

The hike was brilliant. From the top of the hill, you see the town – my house is obscured by a crop of eucalyptus trees; the great expanse of red dirt and green bush beyond the town; and then on the horizon varying shades of gray mountains. Behind the hill, to my back, there were the two smallish, craggy mountains.

On the way back home, I got a plastic bag of frozen juice for a meticais, bit a hole in the corner, and sucked out the contents. It was a sweet end to a sweet morning.