An Overseas Experience that has stayed with me – travel writing
And so it went on, that tunnel of noise. It had rained non-stop now for four days and the tin roof crashed like kettle drums above me. So loud, the music from my portable radio was inaudible. So loud, my thoughts were scattered, jittery, dancing like raindrops in puddles. So loud that the only solace was reading but I was down to my last book and feared reaching the last page. I stared over its pages at the paintwork above my head, spotted with the feathers of dead mosquitoes. I turned my attention back to my book but it was choking me. American Psycho. I threw it down on the bed and stared at its white cover. Its violence and sexuality were digging worms in my head. I had to get out.
Curtains of rain had meant it was practically impossible to walk outside but that morning I’d had a plan – white water rafting, a wet weather activity in wet weather.
“Hola!” I’d cried to the lady at the desk of my hostal, shouting to be heard above the incessant noise. “I’m off white water rafting today!” A peal of excitement had jangled in my voice.
“Oh! No!” she’d declared in response. The rafting company had phoned. The river was high. No rafting today.
Biting down my disappointment, I’d returned to my room, wriggled out of my clothes to take off my bikini, dressed again in shorts and a tshirt. Waited.
But, so much waiting! Four days of waiting! Glaring at my book, I did my sums. A 20 hour bus ride to San Jose would surely take me from under this endless grey cloud. It was worth it. It left in twenty minutes. The bus station was only down the road. I could do it.
I stuffed my things into my unyielding backpack, heaved it onto my back, closed the door on my little room for the last time and thumped down the wooden stairs.
“I’m leaving!” I smiled at the woman.
“Now? You can’t leave!” She gestured to the open doorway, to the sheets of grey-brown water.
“Yes, I’m leaving. Off to San Jose!” Its very name rang gaily in the bleak damp room.
She shrugged. I paid my bill.
“Suerte!” she wished me. Good luck! I turned to leave. Only then did I see that the street had been transformed into a sweeping river, and the brown water had encroached over the pavement, across the doorstep and into the foyer entrance, washing over the red tiles.
“Oh!” I exclaimed. But I couldn’t stay here a minute longer. I was leaving no matter what.
I stepped onto what would have been the pavement. The water was ankle deep. That’s ok. 20 hours on a bus – ample time for my boots to dry. I turned to my left – downstream as it happened – and cast one last look up at my little orange hostal before I started to walk.
A couple of locals hung from upstairs windows of houses gesticulating to me. “Mad foreigner! What are you doing?” I waved them away. I kept moving forwards. Suddenly I was thigh deep in water. I steadied myself from falling forwards. I realised I’d stepped off the kerb and into the road. Deep kerbs here – I remembered looking at them the other day thinking they wouldn’t be allowed in Australia.
I kept walking, plodding, head down, ignoring the torrential rain. The brown water bubbled around me. One foot in front of the other. I could see the road sloped upwards ahead and the water became shallow. Easy. Suddenly – bang – something hit my shin. A rock, I thought, carried by the storm water. I looked down. My shin was under water. I couldn’t see anything but I knew instinctively it was swelling beneath the brown roil. That’s ok. I could put my feet up for 20 hours very soon. I kept going.
I emerged from the water. A man stood under the tarpaulin of his café.
“Leg! Your leg!” he gestured.
“Yes, yes, I know,” I waved away his concern.
“Are you okay? Your leg?”
I looked down. The skin on my shin had split, cleaving a giant hole, like a bullet wound in my leg. The skin was white and thick with the wet. Its edges flapped heavily. From the red hole, blood was gushing. I realised that that was no rock. I’d walked into the kerbside, splitting open my leg. Somehow the rush of the water and the wet enveloping noise of the rain had dulled the pain so that I hadn’t realised the intensity of the impact.
“Ohh! No I’m okay,” I reassured the man. I limped across to the stormwater gutter above his café from where a steady cylinder of clean rainwater was gushing and stuck my leg under it. Pain clattered through my body. I felt myself go weak.
“Sit down! Sit down!” he gestured. I fell backwards into a chair. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to San Jose. I’m catching the bus in 10 minutes. I need to go.”
“Bus! There is no bus today!” He waved his hands at the brown river of water, the sheets of rain, the dripping canvas. No. Of course there is no bus.
“You need an ambulance.”
“No!” I protested weakly, but even as I spoke my mind was swimming.
“I’m phoning an ambulance. The road behind here is still clear.” He disappeared.
Within ten minutes, I was being stretchered onto an ambulance, my leg strapped with someone’s handkerchief, already soaked in blood. I lay immobile, staring ghost-like at the grey plastic ceiling of the ambulance, feeling the axle judder beneath me as we turned corners. Finally, we stopped. I was wheeled across a car park.
“Here!” They left me in a wheelchair in an outdoor concrete yard, undercover from the rain. I didn’t know where I was, how long I would be there. I shivered in the brown-grey damp, my clothes sticking to me. Waiting.
Finally, someone wheeled me into a room. “Lie down!” I clambered onto a dirty looking bed. I stared resolutely upwards as they thrust a needle into my leg. Thread curved through my flesh. A cluster of tiny grey moths sheltered in a corner, almost camouflaged against the yellow, watermarked plaster of the ceiling.
“Okay! Good luck! Be careful!” They ushered me out and I wandered out into the car park and gestured vaguely around me.
“Taxi!”
The owner of the café welcomed me back with a broad smile. “Great! I have been looking after your bag.” He pushed me away as I tried to lift it, lugging it to the open boot of the taxi. Was my passport still in there? I wasn’t sure.
The taxi dropped me back outside the little orange hostal. I feigned indifference. “Could I have a room for tonight?”
“Ah! You are back!” exclaimed the woman, breaking into a huge, tooth-specked grin. She passed me a key. I tried to smile my thanks.
I clomped up the wooden stairs and threw open the door to my old room, already cleaned and tidied, ready for my arrival. Words evaded me and anyway – what point words? I was on my own. I threw down my pack, pulled off my soaking boots and socks and flung myself onto my bed. I stared at the pattern of mosquitoes on the ceiling, tuned into the clatter of the rain on the roof. And waited.
