The angel’s a jerk, the dog is proud, and the plane landed backwards. Time to go.
I’m no stranger to the jet-lagged delirium of a trans-oceanic red-eye flight.
I dropped a class in college because the professor’s preposterously long, slow, erudite sentences were verbal valium.
And I’ve seen The Talented Mr. Ripley.
But I have never been quite so asleep on my feet as I was in Apaneca. Three consecutive nights of inadequate sleep, bracketing a day of endlessly pacing the pavement of voting centers, had left me rather tired. Add to that the sultry Salvadoran heat. And to that an almuerzo lunch special of chicken, rice, and thick french fries, carbohydrates with a side of starch, and my eyelids weighed 17 kilograms each.
(For my American brethren, 17 kg = entertaining hyperbole for an eyelid.)
But I had an appointment at 3:00 PM (I’ll skip the 24-hour clock, in case y’all Americans are still touchy after the kilogram incident) with the zip-line people. My bleary eyes took a minute to focus on my cheap watch. 1:43.
I walked another block. Saw the same mural I’d seen the last time. The dog that barked at me before had given up on life and gone to sleep. My feet felt soaked in cement. Was I accidentally wearing two pairs of shoes? Looking down would be too much work. So sleeeepy .
Shuffled past the bus stop, where a past mayor claimed credit by plastering his name on the shelter. A few years of rough weather later, and it’s not really something one would want to be associated with. This rusty piece of junk was brought to you by the administration of…
Silly politicians, no vision in those people. I looked at the watch again. 1:44.
These murals are getting weirder. They know…
The church! Churches are interesting. The entrance was locked, but I’d seen the other door open. Back around the block. Past the same mural, still weird, same dog, still sleeping.
Inside the church:
nothing.
Renovation.
Always picking on the horny guys.
One statue. An angel stomping on a grumpy devil’s head. Made the angel look like kind of a dick.
Maybe…just…lie down…here.
No! I walked some more, searching for something to find. Said “buenas” at varying volumes when I passed people. I wonder if they think I’m drunk? Looked at the watch. 1:44. Is that possible?
To the market across the street, where three old women with bulging bellies and sagging cheeks didn’t bother to chase the flies off the sticky table any more, but greeted me with smiles as I sat at a trestle table littered with mostly eaten pupusas.
Un cafecito, por favor. Coffee would keep me awake.
She placed the styrofoam cup in front of me. Who the hell invented that stuff? Their descendants should be punished. One of my earliest memories is of the horrible texture of those white bricks, rasping out of a cardboard box on the playground at my pre-school. Baby’s first goosebumps.
The table where I managed my cafecito
I’ve been at this table forever. A scrappy little dog gets up and barks at three schoolboys walking past. I can barely lift my head to watch. It comes over afterwards and stares at me, tail wagging with pride. Too fast for my eyes to follow. Go fetch me a nap, Fido. Pick a fight with me and I’ll kick your butt. Maybe.
I try to write something down and eventually realize that I’ve made a scribble, and the last thing I remember was riding backwards in a plane that was landing on a highway somewhere in China, and wondering if that was normal behavior.
Coffee: ineffective.
I pay my quarter for the coffee and concentrate on lifting my feet high enough for locomotion. Head towards the zip-line office.
Two experiental hours later, two clock minutes, and I verify that they are still closed. Wander to the intersection, out of sheer inertia. Oh.
To my right I see something interesting. The entire town. All the people. Walking towards me in a wide front. Zombie movie? Como se dice Soylent Green?
A hearse. It’s a funeral. With the entire town in attendance. I stand to the side, trying to look respectful. No sleeping at the funeral. Three men see me, detach from the procession, and approach. Uh oh.
“Are you ready?” They ask me. I don’t know. Have I made peace with myself? With my gods? Can I send a couple goodbye emails before you cook me?
Then I notice their shirts. Apaneca Canopy Tour. These are my zip-liners.
“Si” I answer, looking forward to cable-assisted flight. My eyelids weigh only 14 kg now. With luck, I won’t fall asleep while zipping…
(Read more about zip-lining with Apaneca Canopy Tour on my last El Salvador dispatch on the Ethical Traveler website here. And give it a facebook “like” just because.)
Oh man, I can totally feel the sleepiness. I hope the zipping was “awakening”.
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It was, starting with a bumpy ride up the hill to the first cable, although kicking my brain into Spanish might have done more on that score, as I’m sure you can imagine.
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You seem very…I don’t know couragous..or daring to risk a zpi-lining with a jet-lag…!
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It wasn’t a dangerous course, and they warned me before the couple cables that could be trouble if I snoozed off…maybe they’d noticed the eyelids… Danke for reading!
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I thought more about slacklining, but of course, you wrote zip-lining..my fault, surely due to my Bachelor-thesis-jet-lag.
Bitte sehr – ich mag deinen Blog lieber Landstreicher 🙂
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Ah yes, slack lining would be more challenging while drowsy, for sure. Now that you mention it, I haven’t tried that very much…I’ll have to keep an eye out for it next time.
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“And I’ve seen ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’.” It took me a moment, and then by the second sentence of the next paragraph I completely understood, because it had that effect on me as well. This is an entertaining and truth riddle post. Next time my eyelids are turning into kilograms, I will come back here to feel the solidarity. Looking forward to hearing about the Zip-line incident!
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I was wondering if I would upset any Ripley fans. But it’s one of the few movies that just could not hold my interest. Sleepy solidarity for sure, and the zip-line bit is up on the Ethical Traveler page whenever you like (not sure there’s much else to it, so I don’t reckon it’ll get a post of its own).
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The moral of the story: siesta is organic.
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Indeed. I look forward to the day the siesta makes a mass-cultural comeback.
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It’s been a half-decade since I last had to make a cross-the-world flight but I still remember the bone-weariness that it produced. Sleeping on the plane was the most fascinating part of the process since airplane sleep has the strange effect of not actually making you any less tired. It’s a neat trick.
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So true. Sometimes it’s good for passing the time, unless you fall into that torturous state where a long and surreal nap actually lasts 45 seconds. I mostly use those long flights to catch up on my Hollywood blockbusters now, and failing that, my Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me and This American Life podcasts.
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Brilliant. And can I just say: I am so with you on Styrofoam. Every time I replant the pots in my garden and find some of those little white beads from last year’s efforts still pristine and glowing and absolutely not in any way whatsoever biodegraded despite having been buried in the soil for 12 months, I think: whoever invented that is definitely, definitely going to hell.
Did I mention I love your post titles?
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Oy, right? I will always remember the Ecuadoran beach, where kids were bodyboarding on big chunks of styrofoam, leaving a wake of little white pieces of immortal pollution as they slid up among the dead fish on shore. It was a fishing community, and I desperately wanted to gather a town meeting, open up some of the dead fish, and show the people the little pieces of plastic bottles and styrofoam that they were using to kill their own industry.
Wow, that god dark. Sorry about that!
(I love yours too! And I agree that puppy dogs’ tails are very nice things.)
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Maybe you should fill us in on that tiresome class you took for the rest of us who may be having trouble sleeping.
I remember well having jet lag amidst some pretty amazing foreign travels. Don’t know about you, but I found that staying up all day the day I arrive, and then going to sleep at 7 PM and getting up at 9 PM the next day helps immensely to adjust.
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It was Sociology of America, and I was super excited. We spent the first two months on the Miss America pageant. Even that could have been okay, but oy, what lectures. My TA admitted that, as a grad student, she still understood only about 70% of what he was talking about. Erudite references galore, and sentences of 30 words that lasted four minutes, all delivered in a monotone. I stopped going after my snoring disturbed my neighbors. The only class I’ve ever not passed.
Jet lag is a tricky one. Whenever possible, I try to work in a couple days in a halfway-point country to diminish its effects. If I ever make it to Australia, it’ll take at least two weeks to get there!
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I felt tired just reading this – not suggesting for a moment that your sleepy writings put me to sleep – probably more to do with it being bedtime here 😀
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hahahaha Well, I’ll choose to take that in a good way. Hope you got a good night’s sleep! (The timestamp on your comment say 4:24 AM…if that’s accurate, then good lawd, few are the words that wouldn’t put me to sleep at that point.)
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I doubt I’m capable of staying up that late! It would have been 10:24 PM here.
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