Um Buggy
We just had our first real rainstorm. We all went out on deck to take advantage of the free “freshie.” Even so, the humidity is thick enough to spread on toast, which doesn’t do much for comfort, so posts will be shorter.
The customs/immigration office in Porto San Antonio was smaller than most American walk-in closets, but it was air conditioned! Various officials came and went, including two federal police officers who ended up saying they needed to take our passports back to their office for some unknown purpose, which made us all a little nervous.
Wes was able to make arrangements to rent “um buggy” while he was there. It took some finagling to find one that could accommodate five people. We stood for a bit in the sun, then found a place to sit in the shade, and after a fairly short wait (by the standards of “island time”) a young man arrived with our buggy (pronounced “boogie”).
He gave us the rundown on how to drive the buggy, the inside of which looks suspiciously similar to the spartan interior of the old Volkswagon Beetle. There were a few amusing things of note:
- The steering wheel was tiny, like what one might find on a go kart. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but with no power steering in the vehicle, it was a real workout getting the front wheels to move while trying to park.
- Seating for five simply meant that it had a bench seat in the back rather than the more common bucket seats. There was no real place to stow our baggage, so we ended up putting that on the floor and then sitting along the top of the backseat, holding on for dear life.
- He was adamant that people sitting in the front seats have their seatbelts on – visibly so – but showed no concern that three people would be in back not only without seatbelts, but not really even proper seats.
- He was also very adamant about no alcohol.
- Wes was wearing flipflops, and he said it was safer to drive with bare feet than flipflops, which indeed turned out to be the case.
After some fiddling to get it into reverse, we roared off to the petrol station for 10 liters of fuel, then headed into town. We did some recon on a few of the local grocery stories to see what they might have in the way of fresh fruits and veggies. By then it was lunch time, and Auden found us a nice looking restaurant down by the beach, so off we went.
The roads on the island – apart from in town and the main highway – aren’t so much roads as places where the brush and topsoil have been cleared away down to a bed of rocks, and are then sprinkled with small boulders ranging in size from grapefruits to soccer balls.
Here is a video that Auden captured of us coming back up the hill from our lunch spot: