Luna de Miel Part III
Let’s pick up as the honeymooners and their entourage came into Quito, Equador.
Quito, almost 50 years ago, was a rather rag tag affair. We seemed to have found all the rag part because, once again on the recommendation of some random person, we arrived at a hostel that was then and remains now, difficult to describe.
First of all, it was on the second floor over some leather shops.
Then there were the rooms, each with cardboard walls that didn’t reach to the ceiling. It was like a mass of office cubicles with beds and toilets.
Our cubicle had a window, which was not true for the room of our British friends. The benefit of a window was debatable since, as in all of the Andean cities, the combination of vehicular exhausts and cooking fires made the air chewy at best.
We stayed at this hacienda one night and moved on to the Hotel Europa, once a grand place, right on the main plaza.
The once part must have been 100 years before because, although the rooms had 15 foot ceilings and what looked like painted woodwork, most of the former elegance was just that — former.
It did have a bathroom which in my world at that point was a gigantic plus. Beyond the bathroom, there was a bed and a chair and windows overlooking a wall.
Soldiering on, we met up with our British friends and planned a trip to an Incan site, hailing my soon to be hero, the Equadoran cab driver from Brooklyn. Picking up where we left off in Chapter 1, the cabbie did find a pharmacy, described my symptoms and came out with a pack of pills.
I can even remember the name of the medicine — entero viroform.
They worked miraculously.
All of a sudden somewhere out on the Incan highway, I could focus on the journey rather than my awfulness.
All at once, the surrounding mountains were beautiful rather than a backdrop to the next commode.
With repaired innards, I was now enthusiastic about the next leg of our trip that is until we discovered that most of our cash and our camera had been stolen from our room while we were visiting the Incan site.
Were these, how shall I put this — challenges — portents of our future?
We would have to substantially tighten our belts in order to finish the trip, which now was off to the coast of Colombia and the cities of Santa Marta and Cartagena.
Santa Marta was a lovely, quiet almost village- like place where I played bingo in Spanish and slept in a room the same size as the ceiling fan while large bugs dodged its blades.
I could see the headlines: Honeymooners crushed by large fan and prehistoric sized vermin.
Cartagena was all that I had thought it might be.
The Spanish influence was palpable there in the architecture and the pace of life. Costenas, the people who live in the cities on the coast are a mix of ethnicities, strikingly beautiful with a music style that fills you with a delightful energy.
Still, we were on a very tight budget and we hadn’t learned our lesson about taking advice from people we didn’t know.
On the basis of the people with whom we shared a taxi, we booked a room in a hotel on the Caribbean called the Bella Vista.
I can recall standing in front of the place and pointing out all of the large cats that were running along the water’s edge.
The cats turned out to be another mammalian species, rats as big a cats not 30 feet from our “hotel.”
The Bella Vista had its own kind of charm.
The first room that we were shown had a bathroom with a shower.
The problem was that when you used the shower, the foot of the bed got wet.
The landlady told us to shower in the morning so that the bed would be dry by nightfall. Call me picky, but that didn’t seem quite reasonable to me.
We asked for another room.
This room was far more elegant with ornate bedsteads and dressers.
The on-suite bathroom was huge, with all of the modern conveniences.
Hot water in the shower, wonderful hot water, a sink and a toilet made me happy.
It did seem odd that we were advised to place our luggage on top of the dressers.
In my new role as an almost healthy young bride, I didn’t question the directions and chalked it up to local conventions.
Most windows on the coast do not have glass but are rather openings with downfacing louvers that prevent rain from getting in — most of the time. That night it rained hard.
We awoke to three inches of water on the floor. The luggage was safe, but my shoes weren’t.
The rent for our room which included meals was $2.50 a night.
We visited San Felipe the magnificent fort built by the Spanish, explored the desolate but beautiful beaches of Boca Chica and enjoyed wonderful inexpensive Colombian food and coffee.
Funny how you remember things. We were in a ferry on our way out to Boca Chica, a spit of land out from the city of Cartegena when one of the other passengers asked me half in Spanish, half in English if I was an American.
I know that I stood out with my fair skin and my once yellow coat.
She asked why I was there.
When I told her that I was on my honeymoon, she laughed and started to conjugate to be “be, am, are, is, etc.” Why? Who knows? I’ve often wondered if I should have conjugated ser — soy, eres, es…
But my fondest memory is the custom’s agent in Miami, smiling and saying, “Welcome home.”
