Writings By Location| Isla Taquile: Slow Death by Tourism | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
We returned to our room briefly to get flashlights, since there's no lighting on the island, then walked toward the pueblo to meet up again with Francisco, who requested to meet us for dinner, and actually caught us on the way (impressive feat in the complete darkness). We followed him to a tiny one-room restaurant, and had a simple dinner of fried fish and rice. We ate in front of a small TV, with wires running out the back of it and up the walls to a dish outside, and suffered through the end of a really bad C. Thomas Howell TV movie, followed by "Infierno en Lima", a news story about a huge fireworks factory explosion that happened just the night before in Lima, killing 120-150 people. (There's that swath of destruction following us again....)
But the strangest thing of all was that Francisco didn't really talk to us at all. He just sat there, two seats over, eating with us, and watching TV. Was the horrible movie that interesting to him? Were we that boring? Or was it up to us to keep the conversation lively? We ate quickly, wondering every minute when Francisco would start asking the usual questions of "Where are you from?", "How long are you in Peru for?", and "Are you going to eat that fat?", but alas, it never came. We heard the thunder of those ominous clouds getting close, so we paid for dinner — something I hadn't fully expected to do, but did anyway — then returned to our room just as the rain started to come down in buckets. (And for all that, the rain only lasted a couple of minutes anyway.)
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| Home for a Night |
As I mentioned, our room is very simple, and very small. The entrance is via a low doorway that I smacked my head on at least twice, and it leads to a room containing a small stack of shelves with a plastic washbasin and two beds. The washbasin was to be filled from the bucket of rainwater in the courtyard, and that was it for our water supply. The beds each consisted of a thin mattress, and three of four thick wool blankets. The room was warmer than we thought it would be, but we still slept with all our blankets, and our sleep sacks (for the first time all trip), since the sheets looked a little...well, scary.
And after all the climbing we did today, we sure did sleep well.
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