May 19, 2006
Day 233
NKM Adventure Day 10
Butterflies swarm Gabriel's backpack.
We had a few options for leaving Florida today. We were going to go with our fanged friend on his motorcycle to the intersection, but Craig, Gabriel, and I all wanted to go, and with a round trip of three hours per person, it would be a long day. Later in the morning, we heard about a few people who were going to be leaving in a 4X4 truck, and suddenly all of us, including Rose and Tiere were up for leaving. The truck went south to San Ignacio, so Craig, Maxim, and I all got dropped off at the intersection, hoping to catch a ride to the north.
We all sat around the intersection, the same place where we had camped a week ago, and waited for any vehicle to show up. We passed the time by writing in our journals and watching thousands of butterflies, and Gabriel discovered a large rock nearby with a great view of the surrounding jungle. The meseta was also barely visible in the distance.
Three hours went by, but still no vehicles passed us. You know you're in a remote area when you are on the only road for 100 miles and you can write a sentence like that last one. We were getting hungry, so we decided to build a fire and cook some pasta for lunch. No sooner than the pasta had been put into the pot of boiling water, we heard a vehicle coming toward us! It was, in fact, the same bus we rode up in a week ago. We stalled the bus driver for as long as possible while the pasta finished cooking. Finally we grabbed the pot off the fire and jumped aboard. Twenty minutes later the pasta had steamed enough for us to eat it.
The rest of the day was long and boring. The bus slowly made its way north over the bumpy dirt road through the jungle. At one point, we stopped and the driver got out, walked into a house, and fell asleep for two hours. He had been driving the bus for nearly two days straight, so I guess he deserved a break. While we were waiting, we saw a single man on a bicycle ride past us. That was the strangest thing I had seen all day. The light from his bicycle was probably the only one within fifty miles of that point.
We also stopped from about 2:00 AM till dawn so the driver could sleep more. This time, he stayed on the bus. He snored so loud, he was probably the only one asleep on the whole bus.
