Over With

The subtitle of this entry is "My vacation story trumps your vacation story". Although Mr. Jessup's tale of being overcharged for cigarettes in Greece does come close.

We booked ourselves for five nights at La Selva lodge, on the Napo river--and the first four nights were outstanding. Getting there involved a 30-minute flight over part of the "Avenue of the Volcanoes" to a totally crap oil town known as Coca. (Like naming a town "Heroin", but hey--maybe it brings in the tourists.) Once in Coca, we hopped a "bus" (open sided, 1" x 6" boards for seats, a narrow step located several inches under the frame to heave yourself in or out) to the other side of town, where we took off for a three-hour ride in a motorized, canopied (by a tarp) boat. Then a 15-minute walk through a jungle and a 20-minute paddle in a small fiberglass canoe, and then--hurrah--we arrived. The closest thing to a connection with the rest of the world is a 140' bird observation tower, about 10 minutes away from the cabins. Climb to the top of the tower and you can get a cell phone signal.

The lodge consists of 17 cabins connected by slippery boardwalks, a dining hall, and a bar. Everything is made of minimally-processed bamboo, has thatched palm roofs, and is generally very open. A "I can see you through the holes in the exterior wall" kind of open. A few folks--maybe 20?--arrived with us on Monday and were split into groups of about 8, plus a guide. Our guide--24, worked as a guide for just six months--was outstanding. The rainforest is so overwhelmingly dense that I had to make constant choices between walking or looking--both at the same time is basically impossible. It was physically tough, but also much fun, and we had a cool group of smart and funny people to hang out with. They were all going to leave Friday morning, while Sweetie and I were going to stay on another day.

Thursday night (Dias de los Muertos, as well as my brother's birthday), we all sat together for dinner, on one end of a table close to the outside wall. Before dinner, we hung out in the bar and looked up birds we'd seen and checked over photos and had a beer. There was yet another fantastic electrical storm going on, and every so often the sky would light up and the world would go boom. The frosty beverages were delicious, and the company excellent.

So then we all troop into dinner--it's 7pm, and we realize that more people have come in and the lodge is full--like actually, entirely full. Mostly, it's full of old people, and, all of us in the cool kid group being just young enough to be like "oh my god, look at all the old people", are all being mean to some degree. It's a buffet, and we troop up to get our 10,000th bowl of cream-of-something soup. We eat the soup, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. And then, weirdly, the bowls aren't cleared, but everyone heads up for plates of more food anyway. One of the Brits and I are talking, and neither of us are in a particular hurry to line up for roast chicken. So we wait. His sister is asking for bug repellent, and tries to go back to her cabin to get some. Our guide tells what is a very obvious and bad lie that the Brit doesn't want to taste the bug stuff in her food (which doesn't work to disuade her) and then basically has to tell her that no, it's just not a good time to leave the dining hall We're all slightly confused, but mostly are thinking, "it's their last night! maybe there's a surprise coming!"

So then the surprise shows up. A number of staff pour out of the kitchen doorway, followed by two guys in jungle fatigues with bandannas over their faces and holding guns (a larger black handgun, and the kind of military rifle thing that has an extra support handle closer to the front of the barrel, so you can lie down and prop it on the ground in front of you.) They look like Bad Guys just arrived from central casting, but still: They are men with guns, the staff is scared and the whole room goes tense. There is a lot of quickly-spoken Spanish and we are told to get under the tables. No problem, senor y senor con Uzi. Poof, 34 (mostly old) people are under the tables lickety-split.

The Bad Guys walk through to the main entrance of the dining room. Us under-the-table folks are divided between those not completely believing what is happening and those about to throw up from adrenaline. At some point, I realize that Sweetie isn't at his seat, and I panic. (He'd just popped off to use the bathroom, and I hadn't seen him come back.) He was indeed there, but some chairs were shoved in and I wasn't quite as far under the table as I should've been and there was stuff in my now limited field of vision. I remember saying, "I don't know where he is" and then in a bit the chair moved and there he was. He was there the whole time; it's just harder to find a specific face when hidden under a table than you might expect. This part was particularly sucky for me, as one might imagine. If you are the imagining type.

After this bit, we and the two Brits turn into madcap humor machines, including playing "I Spy, With My Little Eye" (T is for Table, C is for Chair, P is for Pants, which apparently means "underwear" in England, so the game ends in grammatical confusion) and Harry The British Birder opening his small birding notebook, where hepretends to write down, "8pm. Under the table. No birds." We are all snorting and giggling like the stoner kids in the back row of science class on the day the teacher talks about the prostate gland.

After a while, it's suggested that we get up and eat our dinners--because roast chicken is just what you want at a time like this, honest. I forced myself to eat a bite because I didn't want the terrible meatloaf from lunch to be my last meal. At some point, there is a gun shot, and we all end up back under the tables. Many people seemed confused, like "was that a gunshot?" I refrained from saying, "no, you jackasses, it was a car backfiring"--but only barely. Yes, in fact, it was a shot, and the manager of the lodge was killed. He'd been working there 12 years, and was the father of four grown kids. I've heard that he got all heroic, and I've heard that he was killed as a warning to the rest of the staff to not try and follow the bad guys. It really doesn't seem to me that it makes a difference.

While we were hiding under the tables, a number of the staff had been tied up while the bad guys emptied the lodge's safe (which contained everyone's passport, wallets and cash). Because we were sitting near a side door into the dining hall, we saw a number of kitchen staff guys slip off to see what was happening--and I learned that secretly, all the staff are actually some kind of amazing Amazonian ninjas. After the shot, one of them came tearing back in the front door holding his white t-shirt, flung himself to the floor and proceeded to wiggle across it until he was right next to Claudia and I. He got into his shirt, I swear, without his chest ever leaving the floor. He hid his face and lay next to us, and I remember thinking, um...if someone with a gun is looking for you, would you mind not being quite so close? Around this time there was a second shot. With this one, it was aimed at a guy who was able to dive out of the way--he hit his head, but otherwise was OK.

At this point, it basically all turns into paperwork. We had to spend a few more hours in the dining hall, most everyone (including us) got their passports back, and we were ultimately allowed to go back to our cabins, where we had to pack to leave the next day (so much for our extra night). The lodge got all their guests out on the morning plane and herded us into their Quito office, where a bunch of total jerks took over the phone lines to cancel their credit cards while our friends tried to get a line out to start dealing with their missing passports. Unhappily, the lodge totally failed when it came to getting these same friends a hotel room or emergency cash for the evening--we ended up putting a room for them on our plastic, and shoving a stack of cash at them. We offered that from the start when we got everything back (and paranoid Boom had kept a small stash of cash in the cabin, so we were not penniless), and certainly were happy to help...but only happy from a friend perspective. From a "why isn't the lodge stepping up" perspective...it was awful. I tell myself they were shocked and sickened at losing their friend and coworker; I tell myself that the awful travelers who took over the office wore out their customer service tolerance...and honestly, telling myself that doesn't make me much less angry about how they handled that part of the repercussions.

Yes, it's just paperwork, but when you're stuck in this awful Catch-22 of no emergency wire funds without a passport; no way to get emergency ID until the four-day weekend is over, no credit card for a hotel, not enough cash to cover three nights in anything but the cheapest shared-bathroom hostel...and you've just been hiding under a freaking table and you were unlucky enough to have been in one of the four cabins that the bad guys went through...anyway, we sort of stuffed them into a decent hotel they'd stayed in before, and got them some cash for food, and the next day they were able to get ahold of the guy who worked for the big-ass tour company they'd used for booking, and he started working some paperwork miracles for them. (The company was GAP Tours, by the way, for anyone who books via tour operators. The guy was a white-hatted champion for our friends.)

For us, by that point, it was basically over. We're mailing off some paperwork to the lodge, as there's some idea that we'll actually get the stack of cash from the safe returned via insurance settlement. There was also a bit of unpleasant small-worldness on the sailboat, which I will save for another time.

Now that we're home in the relative dullness of Capitol Hill, I have noticed that, of course, now is when I am startled awake at small noises and have moments of "oh my god, that actually freaking happened and was not a B movie". Even more annoying, when I do wake up to noises (there's some remodel stuff going on in the building), I immediately flash back to a year ago, when the fire happened and think, "oh crap, hello adrenaline, gotta fight/flight". And really, "annoying" is the right word for it--of course there's some post-traumatic crap from both those events. Of course the newer one feeds a delayed reaction to the older one. And of course, me being me, it really doesn't feel anything but tedious. Yeah, yeah...I'll have some bad nights and some crying and probably an inappropriate argument with Sweetie and some other misplaced anger followed by some personal fucking growth...can we just be done with it?

This irritated pragmatism is for myself, rather than the relatives of the guy who'd been shot. All of his family except his youngest daughter were out of the country when this happened. The office manager had to call her at home and tell her that her dad was dead, and then she had to contact her siblings and mom and get them home. The funeral was the Sunday after it happened. I also feel a lot of sympathy for what our young guide is up against. We saw her a couple of times after it happened--her family, not surprisingly, does not want her to go back. She wants to be a guide, but isn't sure she'd feel safe there (her cabin was gone through, plus of course she had to be all professional and calm with the guests while this was happening). Perhaps being a guide at another lodge? We tried to encourage her to do that, because she was fantastic.

So there's the big story. Feel free to take your laptop under a table and read it while sitting there--it might add something to the ambiance.

Comments

[a wessler]

I do google searches on the topic of lodge robberies from time to time, because I myself was robbed at La Selva Lodge in 2004. Guys came out of the night, shot a few guns and emptied the hotel safe, where we had, at the strong recommendation of the hotel manager, deposited our valuables.

I tried to get the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs to put a warning about this place on their website, but they were afraid of naming specific venues for fear of making "libellous" statements; despite being forwarded a police report. They did put in a watered down statement advising against travel to the province in which La Selva is located, but hey, who consults a politicall map.

[jungle armitage]

not only did i read your startling entry under my desk, i read it whilst gnawing at a roasted chicken carcass. good lord. good lord. i mean, good lord.