In the Country

Today we hired a motorcycle from our local ¨go to¨guy, who looks like a young Forrest Whitaker, who was one of the guys driving the officials to our boat yesterday. This guy wants to do everything for us, and wants to get paid. he pretty much flagged this bike-taxi dude down and told him to get off his bike so the gringos can have it. While I worried about the niceties of insurance and liability, my father rented it off him for about 15% below the market rate for bike rental. We set off into the coutnryside on a 125cc yamaha, which protested to no avail, roaring past all these simple houses. I always thought dirt poor was a figure of speech, but when your floor is actually made of dirt, well, then you dirt poor. The people are all lean and muscular, with near perfect skin. Now how do you feel? Bad huh? Don´t worry, me too. Seeing 5 year old kids lug water, and every guy with a washboard abdomen is a little disheartening. Yet the odd paradox about his place is that half the people are doing hard manual labour, and the other half are sitting around shooting the breeze.

In this country, if you want a girl, you got to have a motorbike. Then you can drive around with her on the back. If you don´t have a motorbike, you are stuck walking in the head, making ssurly, suspicious faces at foreigners. Why they do that, I don´t know. They are all healthy, have the physiques that office workers pay thousands to TRY to obtain, and the sun was shining. Is it cos I is light brown?

The history of these islands is terrible. Almost without exception the story goes like this - Native people arrive on islands, live together with various degrees of harmony for a thousand or so years, Spanish arrive, enslave, kill and give disease to populace, wither wiping them out entirely, or leaving less than 5000, many many african slaves are imported to work on sugar plantations, slaves win independance, vicious dictators rule, tourists pour in and sit on the beaches. I can understand why they may feel some greviances for such things, but it´s not my fault personally. Anyway, I carry liberal middle class guilt! Can´t they see that?

We got a flat tyre whilst driving, and got our bike fixed by what seemed to be a 13 year old mechanic - the guy was running his own store it seemed. Man, it just makes me think that I´ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. We tried to get the money back from the guy who rented us the bike, but he wasn´t having it at first, until we went to a regular genuine rental company with him, and the guy there told us that he, a genuine rental bike shop owner, would have paid. So the moral of the story is, go to geniune rental guys.

The chicken here tastes just great. They live outside you see, and enjoy sunlight, bugs and scraps.

I´ll write more when I know more.

Your friend,

Miguel