![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/mantaber.jpg\")
On
\n the move again. After a rewarding and productive two weeks in Ecuador,
\n we are on our way to Peru, where our ungrateful,
\n irresponsible firstborn son will NOT be waiting at the airport, as
\n promised, due to what he lamely claims is a rare "paying customer" (at
\n his Eco-tourism hotel high in the mountains) but which we,
\n with the jaundiced eye of a war-worn parent suspect was a drunken bout
\n of Baccheal boisterousness. But we are getting ahead of ourself.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, a long hard ride from Manta, our beach
\n hideout and future retirement resort, to Guayaquil, the figurative
\n armpit of the Pacific coast of South America, a big, dirty industrial
\n and commercial city which, contrary to the prevailing opinion on the
\n Gringo trail, we have always found to be a fascinating cauldron of
\n human pathos and arrested development. There is always something
\n interesting going on in Guayaquil, if you can find it and stay out
\n of trouble in the process. <\/p>\n
Years ago, when we were young and irresponsible,
\n before we had discovered the secret paradise of Manta, we hung out
\n in the generically named beach town of Playas, a much grubbier and
\n funkier fishing village cum working class beach town about 90 minutes
\n from Guayaquil. From there, we would regularly venture back into the
\n big city for entertainment, drugs, newspapers, real food and the kind
\n of
\n adventures young American beat\/hippie travelers can easily fall into
\n in any of the seamy, crime-infested third world cities scattered around
\n the torrid and temperate zones near the equatorial divide.<\/p>\n
Now, thanks to our having married a severe Ecuadorian
\n accountant, the lovely Norma Yvonne, we stay with middle class families
\n in fashionable "urbanizations", eat at the finest restaurants, and
\n are forced to wear clothes, most of the time. <\/p>\n
Yesterday’s bus trip was made much more difficult due
\n to the assortment of physical ailments we have accumulated as we bounced
\n around on this pre-season tour. Unfortunately for our athletic aspirations,
\n as soon as we arrived at the Umina Tennis Club in Manta, we developed
\n the worst case of tennis elbow in our 40 years as a catgut hacker, which
\n a local sawbones instantly diagnosed as "tendonitis agudo". It got to
\n the point that every time we tried to serve, our eyes would fill with
\n stars, then tears, and as a result we lost every match we tried to play,
\n except one against a 75-year-old career diplomat with one eye and an
\n artificial knee. But we slogged on. As every over-the-hill athlete knows,
\n losing doesn’t matter, as long as you manage to get down a bet against
\n yourself.<\/p>\n
Now, finally forced off the court by travel commitments,
\n our right (racket) arm feels
\n like
\n it’s
\n going
\n to
\n fall off, and the constant pain, from shoulder to wrist, keeps us awake
\n at night, at least when our medication wears off. Luckily, powerful
\n narcotic painkillers are easy to get ahold of in this neck of the woods.<\/p>\n
On top of that, and our world-class first degree sunburn,
\n now rapidly evolving into the peeling phase so that we leave behind us
\n a tell tali trail of DNA detritus of skin shards like a molting snake,
\n we have developed a severe case of that voyager’s bane, Pizarro’s revenge.
\n In a vain attempt to ameleorate the suffocating equatorial heat (regularly
\n hitting 39 or 40 degrees Celsius, which we hesitate to even translate
\n into Farenheight), we have been taking an average of 8 or 9 showers a
\n day, and downing an equal number of bottles of supposedly purified drinking
\n water. A few days ago, we noticed that one of the bottles we purchased
\n at some corner store or ambulatory dispenser, had a strange, stanky smell
\n and taste. Well, water is water, we figured, and a little weird water
\n never hurt anybody. Little did we know. <\/p>\n
Luckily, we abandoned that bottle after drinking about
\n a third. Had we finished it off, we would undoubtedly have
\n required hospitalization. As it is, we have spent the past two
\n days running constantly to the nearest toilet, emitting liters of anal
\n liquid, like brackish brown, malarial moisture out of a high-pressure
\n police hose at some street demonstration in a Bangladesh slum. leaving
\n us feeling like the life has been sucked out of us by a demonic vampire
\n bat.<\/p>\n
Adding insult to injury, we went to our favorite Manta
\n pharmacy for a chemical cork, and by mistake purchased Lotrial instead
\n of Lomotil. Only later did we vaguely remember that Lotrial was not for
\n diarrhea, but rather a medicine we used to take for high blood pressure.
\n We think. We hope, as it would be an unpleasant surprise to discover,
\n in mid flight, that it was instead intended for constipation, or insomnia,
\n or incontinence.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the buzz on the street, the story everyone
\n is talking about, is the macabre death watch over poor Terry Schiavo
\n and her tubular twin, the Pope. These stories are front page news in
\n every city we have visited, and people argue endlessly about the medical,
\n moral and financial issues it brings to the fore. It is easy to understand
\n this obsession, as everyone wonders if they are seeing a prequel of their
\n own eventual demise. Are we looking forward to a future of vast antiseptic
\n farms of Pod People, hooked up to a nest of tubes, wires and medical
\n apparatus,
\n sustained by science in a nebulous purgatory between life
\n and death?<\/p>\n
It touches a deep fear in all of us, fear of a sort
\n of geriatric Matrix, or a nightmare from which we cannot awake. It is
\n a scenario bound to be repeated with increasing frequency, around the
\n globe, modern medicine run amok, soulless scientific life support. These
\n are certainly questions to which the Dowbrigade has no answers, other
\n than to know that in our case being abandoned with our dog and iBook
\n on a desolate ice floe in the Arctic would be preferable to the 15 years
\n of slow torture that poor woman has been put through.<\/p>\n
But enough thoughts of death and depression. We have
\n to pack our bags and get ready to head back to the airport for the flight
\n to Lima. Despite his previous promises of filial fealty, number one son
\n will not be awaiting us with a fatty in Jorge Chavez airport, named after
\n Peru’s most famous aviator, the first man to fly over the Andes. The
\n fact that he crashed and died before landing his plane is now looked
\n at with a sort of tragic nobility, and is in many ways emblematic of
\n the doomed cost of glory hanging over this Andean nation, once
\n the seat of the greatest empire the western hemisphere has ever known.
\n At least until the emergence of the current American Empire girding the
\n globe. Who can predict the cost of that hubric glory, other than
\n a sneaking suspicion that we too will have to crash and burn at some
\n lonely crossroad in the misty, unseen future.<\/p>\n
So we will have to wait until tomorrow to see Joey,
\n and will try our best to suppress our disappointment in unkept promises
\n and dissolute delay. Life is too short to linger on recriminations
\n and resentment. Instead we will do our best to enjoy every minute of
\n the time we can spend together. In a week, we will be back in Boston,
\n and it will all seem like a dream, the raw material for our sustaining
\n memories, and fodder for a few good blog posts.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the move again. After a rewarding and productive two weeks in Ecuador, we are on our way to Peru, where our ungrateful, irresponsible firstborn son will NOT be waiting at the airport, as promised, due to what he lamely … Continue reading