The Road to La Hisperia

In the seat behind me a man with a coarse black moustache is eating hot chicken from a grey plastic pot. The bus makes a tight corner and I am pressed against the warm, elevated arm of an old woman with lined copper skin; at her feet is a basket of live chickens who squark and scuffle with each other. The road is cut into a steep mountain, and the right side of the bus grapples with the loose stones that border the road and the steep cliffs that descend into the valley.
We look out on dense tropical forests that sprawl lazily in the valley basins, the humid air sticking to the window in fat droplets.
As the driver overtakes an oil tanker on a blind corner an old man in a thread-bear suit crosses himself and dabs his forehead with a stained hankerchief; even though I am not religious I feel like doing the same. People have more reason for religious faith here; without risk assesments or cancer screenings or the highway code.... or any of the other things that have become the medern day gods and bibles of Western society.
We pass a derelict waterpark named ´Hostel Florida´where faded yellow fun slides plunge into think green water; broad forest leaves floating like giant lillypads on the surface.
As we pass the small town two merchants board this bus selling ripe fruits in cascading orange nets held tightly in their fists. The wooden houses in the village are slumped angularly on wooden stilts; mothers linger at the windows with their babies wrapped in brightly coloured cloths.
The conducter beckons me to the front of the bus as we grind to a halt in an even smaller village further down the road. I hesitantly disembark as my backpack is thrown from the luggage hold onto the grassy bank. I cannot see the landmark mentioned in my directions, and start to panic as I notice the magnitude of nothingness on either side of the village. A couple of houses down two men in overalls are fixing rusted black jeep beneath a bamboo canopy. As I approach them one of them looks up and points in the direction of a small path set back from the road without speaking. I look up into the mountains and notice the whispy forest of cloud that merges with the distant treetops; ghost like against the pale blue of the sky.