On the Road to Trinidad

On Thursday we return the moto & rent a car and start driving towards Trinidad, a city about 6 hours away. We get on the autopista, the main highway, but after a few miles the road becomes more of a wide, paved road, without lane markings. Then it hits another similar looking road and ends. Then that road seems to peter out into a regular road, then we go through a few more towns, and pretty soon we are completely lost. There are no road signs on any of the roads or intersections, nor any real signs that tell you the names of the towns or anything. I'm pretty sure we took some wrong turn earlier on, but I'm not sure which was the turn where we made a mistake, nor how to get back to it. We stop in some town at a gas station and Tiina asks directions, with the map. The guy laughs and says, "A map? That won't help you." Well, we couldn't find any road signs. "Road Signs? They won't help you either. Just head down this road until you go under a bridge, and then the road splits stay left, and then about 20 kilometers later you'll hit another bridge and turn onto that road."

We hit a split in the road before we come to any bridge, so we stay left, but then we go more than 20 km without hitting any other bridge.

I've sometimes brought a compass along on trips, especially camping trips, but I've never found one actually useful. Here, though it would have useful. If we had a compass we could stay generally southward and eastward and head in the right direction. I take out my cell phone and turn on the GPS. It can't get a signal, and it can't show me any map of where we are, but it can, using GPS, function as a compass. I have a $400 cellular phone, which can't make or receive calls here, receiving signals from a network of satellites in space, all to function as a basic compass.

We saw guards by sentry towers and realized we were driving by a prison, so we double back and took some photos. The guards eye as warily and we make sure they can't see us taking pictures. This turnaround was convenient because we stopped at one of the few convenience store fronts, basically a house with a counter at the front, that sold few and varied wares and asked for directions. Turns out our bearings after taking several random turns were correct -- we were told to go back the same direction we were originally headed and that the small road would join the main highway in approximately 3 kilometers.

We found the main highway, still unmarked, but noticeably bigger and somewhat better paved than the other roads! And the GPS device confirms that we are now traveling in the right direction - southeast. Not long afterwards, we pass the first actual dot on the map, another sign
Trinidad is only 340 km away, and even find a small fast food eating place called a palmar. We have grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and freshly made potato chips. The service is and friendly, and clearly everyone is driving through, and not a local to that part of town, except maybe a few guys who came to use the phone there.

We pass through several small towns. There are as many horse-drawn carriages here as there are cars.

At one intersection about an hour from Trinidad we stop to pick up two hitchhikers, a mother and daughter. The daughter is in high school, about 18, and the mother has a job in the same town where the daughter goes to school. With them in the car we're able to avoid several wrong turns and save some time. We get to their house, about 30 minutes from Trinidad, and give the a ride about a mile off the main road to their house. The mother invites us in to meet her parents who live in the house with them, and for coffee. They have an all white cat with one green eye and one blue. There is no reference to the father of the daughter and no picture of him. From the way the mother refers to the older man & woman, Tiina thinks the man is her step-father, not her father. We notice this with several people we meet, a lack of reference to fathers or the "standard" nuclear families.