|
|
|
| Snake Juice in Vilcabamba |
n Vilcabamba, Ecuador, for $9 a night you can get a dormitory-style bed, breakfast, and dinner in a nice hostel, access to a pool, Jacuzzi hot tub, movie viewing room, hammocks by the poolside, a bar, and a book exchange. Everything about the hostel was designed for the gringo budget traveler. I wouldn't have stayed as long as I did, but after two weeks in Quito immersed in Spanish school and living with a Spanish-speaking family, it was an entertaining break to socialize with other people who I could communicate with. And of course there were pretty girls to flirt with!
Janna was among our party. She was a lovely, tall young woman from Germany who had taken a year out of her university program to travel around South America. I first met her in the hostel's hot tub. She slipped into the hot tub, lit a cigarette, and with very fluent, cultured English told me about her travels to places where I wanted to visit later in my vacation. She had a classic natural beauty and could have very well have earned a living as a model, in my opinion. When I said something to that effect, she got a bashful shy look and admitted that her sister worked as a model for a while and she also thought about it, but she was self-admittedly shy by nature, and she was feeling good about her university program in biochemistry.
Caroline was a delightful 27-year old from a small town at the foot of the Alps in France, and grew up on snow skis. She was quiet, good natured, very fluent in English, and her slightly crooked smile was joyous and bright.
Ketcha was an exotic 20-something beauty from Switzerland, with wild brown wavy shoulder-length hair. Occasionally something said in English eluded her, and she often asked Caroline to interpret for her. Ketcha and Caroline weren't traveling together, but Caroline's English was better and they shared French as a common language.
Ruth from England was talkative, speaking so rapidly that all of us, myself included, had problems understanding her English. Sometimes Caroline from France would understand Ruth's English and interpret for me. Innocent and cute, Ruth was a 20-something former teacher, on vacation to figure out what to do with her life.
One evening I found Ruth in our shared dorm room, painting her toe nails. Ruth mentioned something about leaving her book out by the pool. One of our dorm-mates, a young Israeli man, jumped up and said, "I'll get it!" and rushed out of the room. After he'd left, Ruth kept painting her toenails and said in a low voice, "he didn't have to do that!"
"Ruth," I said, "you're so adorable that any guy would do anything you asked, and you know it, don't you?"
She kept painting her toenails. "Well, yes, I guess so... my mother always said that I had all the men in the world wrapped around my little finger."
One night at the communal dinner I found myself seated near these four lovely young European travelers. I proposed that later we go on a field trip down the road to the tiny -- very tiny -- pizza/bar place called "Shanta's," and they agreed. What an interesting group!
So, some time after dinner, I escorted Janna, Caroline, Ketcha, and Ruth down the road to Shanta's. Shanta's is known for its "snake juice." On the counter at the bar, there is a large industrial-sized glass jar filled with clear liquid and with a real snake, quite happily dead now, curled up in the bottom one-fourth of the jar. The owner would draw shots of snake juice out of the jar. None of my companions dared touch the stuff, not at first, anyway.
Ruth talked until she tired herself out, and left us at Shanta's to go back to the hostel and to bed early. About that time another patron heard some French coming from our table and slid over our way. She was from Poland. With a narrow cloth tied around her forehead and her wild curly hair, she was the perfect image of a gypsy. She was a wanderer. I got the impression that she had done nothing in her life but travel: she seemed to have a story about every city and port in the world. She was young, but of indeterminate age. At some point in her life she had managed to get a very good education. She spoke Polish, plus very fluent French and English, and a smattering of several other languages, plus we even had a short conversation about classical Latin grammar. She seemed to know a little something about everything and everywhere. She would deftly switch between English and French when speaking with our group, then between breaths translate to Polish for her companion, a young man from Poland whose lack of any language other than Polish made him a visible but mostly silent part of our party.
When this world-wise gypsy introduced herself, I thought her name sounded similar to "Agni." I asked her if her name was related to the Sanskrit name, "Agni," god of fire. "Yes!" she exclaimed, pleased that someone recognized the connection. We talked a bit about the Indian concept of the divine fire. For the rest of the night I called her "my goddess of fire."
After a lot of fascinating conversation, we said a very merry good-night to the husband-and-wife owners. The owner, looking like he was plucked from the outback with his handlebar mustache and cowboy hat, offered our group two shots of snake juice, on the house. Quiet Caroline had loosened up by then and shocked us by trying a shot. A lick of salt, she downed the shot and grabbed for the lime wedge and quickly bit into it. It took her several minutes to get a very disgusted look off her face. Ketcha from Switzerland, the most outgoing of the group if you didn't count the gypsy goddess of fire, decided that she needed to try the snake juice too. A lick of salt and she downed the shot and grabbed for the lime. But she didn't stop there. She had to have a second. Her hair, already wild, looked a bit wilder after that. If she wasn't uninhibited before, she was after two shots of snake juice! She started jabbering at the bar owners in what must have been comprehensible Spanish, because they carried on an animated and hilarious conversation. I didn't have any idea that this Swiss beauty knew Spanish that well; she hadn't given us a clue before that of how good her Spanish was. It's amazing what that snake juice can do to a person!
It took several of us a while to get Ketcha pried away from the counter. We finally got her turned around and headed out the door, back to our hostel. Along the way Agni insisted that we had no choice in the matter - we all had to stop by her room at the hostel to share in a pineapple that she bought earlier that day.
Back at the hostel six of us crowded into the little room that Agni and her companion shared. Agni put on some quiet but exotic Polish and Romanian music, and time slipped away with conversation alternating between fascinating and hilarious.
We all managed to show up the next morning at the communal breakfast. A Dutch fellow, Greg, took a seat at the table looking quite grumpy. Someone asked him if he was feeling well. "No, I was up all night because of some party next door." Not one of us fessed up.
| Note to fellow travelers: Your Journal Once in a while make copies of your journal or diary pages and mail them home to yourself. I met one traveler who was in shock because her personal journal had just been lost or stolen. All her names, email addresses, and personal notes were gone forever. NOTES INDEX |
|
|
|
Index of stories:
|
|