The Siren's Code

Bused up

(The year 2034)

Cassie woke as the sun was about to peak over the horizon, still dark but not so dark you can't see. Relieved, as the last thing she remembered was thinking she wouldn't sleep at all. Still groggy she let her head bounce against the bus window, idly mapping the myriad of cables in an unfathomable network of knots and chao swinging and twisting from post to pillar to rickety street light along the moving roadside, punctuated here and there by fireworks brought on by mischievous monkeys.

How countries run on this type of electric infrastructure she has no idea. Especially as this country – she assumed she was now in El Salvador having had the usual night time border check, guards boarding the bus, waving guns around, pointing torches right in your eyes while gruffly asking for passports – had pioneered the harebrained idea of making Bitcoin their official currency. A start according to most reports as rocky as the mountains surrounding her. In a country where the electricity is in the hands of monkeys, quite literally, and the internet as patchy as her Spanish... madness.

This was day two of her mammoth thirty-six hour forty-five minute bus trip from Mexico City to the port where she hoped she could get a boat to a small Island off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Specifically to Paradise Bungalows, Latitude 12°29'35.7"N, Longitude 83°23'23.9"W, in hope of discovering the reason for the cryptic post-it note she'd found in her jeans shorts pocket... that she had wearing... just under a week before.

Cassie had already stopped in Antigua, Guatemala to break up the trip, staying in a not very satisfactory packer hostel, The Lost Tortoise, or La Tortuga Perdita the sign had actually said. In hindsight she sort of wished it had been so lost that she hadn't found it. She slept in a cubicle not dissimilar to how she imagined a prison cell. Disgusting mattress on a wooden base, side table, light bulb hanging from the ceiling and a clean-ish sheet. It wasn't worth putting the light on anyway as you could see the roaches scuttling around, and she was sure someone threw cake at her over the partition in the night.

There were no bins in these cubicles so maybe the next door person didn't want to leave the crumbs out for the roaches and other larger rodents, instead chucking them over their shoulder into the next door cell a little like one throws salt at the devil, was she the devil? After very little sleep in hot dusty countries she had no idea.

Airbnb has brought a little more luxury to 'travelling' but you could still find a $10 a night bed if you needed it as long as you paid hard currency and although pretty gross, a hostel full of backpackers was generally safe. Unless you were unlucky enough to be cohabiting with one with a habit in which case your valuables were as unsafe as anywhere else.

That said, a walk around Antigua old town was breathtaking. It had been early evening as the sun started to set over the Acatenango volcano giving the place a super-focused 3D effect like she was wearing Oculus goggles – and perhaps she would have learned more about the churches, convents, courtyards and cobbled streets if she did have an inbuilt tour guide – but the visuals were enough. The twilight enriching the green foliage and pinks, ochres and mustard yellows of the colonial buildings around the old town square. Cassie loved these buildings, she sort them out in any country she went to. Knowing that colonial mainly meant Europeans invading and taken over using slave labour and torturous conditions, they weren't very 'her generation', but they are so beautiful, huge windows, doors, ante-rooms, shabby opulence of purple and jade, she could imagine families living there three hundred years ago, discovering antiquities from their travels, bringing them back to decorate their homes. The faded colours eroded by heat and light just drew her in, complementing the vivid mauve flowers of the rambling bougainvillaea sprouting from every nook and cranny.