backroad prattle

I started running. The situation was simple: to get out of this sun-scorched city before anyone noticed I had gone.
I’m not sure exactly how I ended up getting into the car, it was something lost in translation. I had decided, in the midst of increasingly tenuous relations between Columbia and Venezuela, to travel haphazardly across the boarder. A word of Spanish yet to permeate my skull, and on my first lone trip out of the quaint little villages of East Anglia; my idyllic, cross country jaunt never really had a chance.
I began in Caracas, ignoring frantic advice from locals to go home, I continued undeterred along gradually disintegrating roads to Maracaibo. Here my journey ended.
The bus pulled in at 6am. Though I considered this a peaceful dawn, it was actually the dwindling end of a long night. Not a good time to be out on the streets, searching for a bus station that existed when my guide book was written, in 1996.
Once out of the capitol, in terms of communication Venezuela becomes virtually impenetrable to the monolingual tourist. After a few entirely non-verbal enquiries at the ticket sales office, a large crowd began to swamp the air around me. I understood nothing of the scene that ensued; I was ushered into the back seat of a ‘taxi’, my bag had gone in first, and I was to follow. The sharp click of the locks echoed through the sudden silence of the metallic cage, after the heated Spanish discussion that had surrounded me moments before. It was a while before the crowd dissipated and my driver joined me, but from there the car sped out of the bus station, its rusting wheels seeming to crumble into the shifting sands of the road beneath. As the city disappeared behind us a tirade of questions clogged my throat, but my companion stared blankly at the road ahead; even if he wanted to hear me he couldn’t understand the words.
The road was straight. There were no obstacles in the desert to make it turn, only the incessant spray of dust scuttling in wisps across the burning tarmac, blending the early morning sky with the vast expanse below. We hadn’t been driving long when a small cluster of stalls rose up out of the hardened sand and the car began to slow. Through the window I saw garlands of bananas hanging from every hook or man available in a make shift bazaar. We pulled up to a vendor shouting through the groves of banana huts. The driver got out. The moment the locks broke free of their bonds my bag was swung onto my back and I was running.