Once I picked up a policeman near Ciego de Avila, in the centre of the island, and took him two hundred or so miles back to his beat in Havana. When I spotted him by the road, I decided that having a law enforcement officer alongside might gain certain advantages in the event of any problem, so I welcomed him into my hire car. Of course, we chatted along the way and presently I asked him what the roadside salesmen, who held up their produce at the side of the highway as we passed, were selling. "Queso" (cheese), he answered, but I already knew: I wanted to prepare him for my purchasing a large block as a present for the mother of a girlfriend from Guanabacoa, a suburb to the east of the capital. Barbara's mum, Zobeyda, was understandably suspicious of me, a fly-by-night tourist, and I guessed that my gift of the local cheese, which is solid, crumbly and bland, would be well received, since she would use it in making the pizzas that she sold from her house and which were her only source of income.
When the next motorway vendor came into sight I slowed the car and explained my plan to my passenger. I hadn't considered the legality of roadside sales until the policeman, in uniform, got out of the car and the poor startled guajiro started to hightail it across the carriageway. To his credit, the policía recognised the favour he owed me, despite the law, and gestured to the fast-disappearing cheese seller to relax, whereupon we met and transacted our business. In the end the dairy gift, plus a brick of semi-solid guayaba conserve, did the trick: Zobeyda's resolve broke and I was a welcome guest for the rest of the holiday. It was a great experience to share Cuban life, away from the holiday hot-spots.
By the way, in Barbara's case I wasn't just a fly-by-night tourist. When she subsequently escaped from Cuba to Berlin, on the pretext of singing in a Cuban band on tour, I went over three times to help her out. She is still there, awaiting her residence permit, in an immigration limbo and unable to return to Cuba, where she'd be arrested and thrown into jail. In Germany she can get only the poorest paying jobs and she hasn't seen her lovely mum for nearly two years, but she is determined to break free. Whatever the benefits of Fidel's revolution (and there are some), they are outweighed by the disadvantages ... and yet I dread the eventual economic and cultural reannexation of the island by the United States, which seems inevitable.
To get back to my original topic, I was about to explain that I pick up hitchhikers, depending upon the circumstances, firstly because, in countries where most of the people are too poor to have their own transport, it seems only polite to do so, but also because, from time to time, the connections I make lead to invitations and diversions that you'd otherwise never experience as a tourist. Even if those things don't come about, your passengers can often tell you about dangerous places to avoid or simply the location of the next lead-free petrol station - valuable information in many Latin American countries, where leaded petrol and diesel are more readily available.
Before my nearest and dearest start to fret and to admonish me for my incaution, I would say that that I do exercise some judgement in choosing to whom I give a lift. And I have rules: (1) no pick-ups after dark, and (2) no men without women or children. I've already broken both of these on this trip. On one occasion I was driving along an empty highway through the high pine forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental, between Cusárare and Guachochi in Chihuahua state, when I stopped for a Tarahumara youth with a chain saw. If that sounds like the opening scene of a horror movie, then I should point out that the Tarahumara Indians are very reserved (and very poor), preferring to avoid contact with whites, whom they have good reason to view with caution. Moreover, I decided that he wouldn't be able to threaten me with the chain saw because there wasn't enough elbow room in the front passenger seat to pull the cord with enough power to get it going. Of course I never found out if I was right in that estimation. He got out at the next Tarahumara village, having said hardly a word to me. I didn't mind.The pick-up that I made after dark led to my best adventure so far on this trip. I was driving along the coast road from Mazatlán south to San Blas, a small resort-cum-shrimping port in Nayarit, which is also a favourite destination for bird-watchers. I stopped behind a queue of vehicles in the middle of the countryside, expecting it to have been caused by the usual alternating one-way traffic control around roadworks, and waited ... and waited. It seemed strange because there were over-long intervals between the groups of oncoming traffic that were passing us and yet we were not moving on our side.
The traffic filed up behind me until both ends of the queue were out of sight, even with the use of my birding binoculars (Canon 15x45 Image Stabilization - wizard!). People started getting out of their vehicles and chatting. The guy in front of me in a Dodge pick-up with California plates came over. He was a Mexican, bringing his family home to Jalisco for Christmas. We swapped our stories then he flagged down a passing lorry for information. I was right: the queue was caused by roadworks, but they were on an unavoidable narrow bridge ahead and those responsible had badly miscalculated their ability to manage the traffic. The queue on this side of the bridge, said the truck driver, was twelve kilometres long and it would take us over two hours to get through the bottleneck.
Now if this had happened to me in Britain, while I was a stressed and uptight worker, I would have exploded in whining indignation at anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. Here, with no timetable and no-one waiting for me, I briefly considered and quickly rejected turning back, then resigned myself to the long wait. I did some birdwatching from the roadside. I listened to my iPod (2-4-6-8 Motorway, Baby You Can Drive My Car, Life in the Fast Lane, that sort of thing). A federal police truck drove past on the wrong side of the road, siren blaring, evidently to investigate and followed inevitably by several impatient smart alec drivers. The fair-minded folk remaining in the queue were enormously gratified when the self-important queue-jumpers were forced off the road by an oncoming convoy of articulated trucks, so that they gave up their trick and rejoined our line (ahead of me, though).
It began to get dark. My policy is to avoid long-distance driving at night because of the multiple hazards on Latin American roads - potholes, wandering livestock, vehicles without lights, the infamous Mexican "topes" (what we call sleeping policemen) - but this time I was going to have to cover the final fifty miles in the dark. After two-and-half hours, we finally got moving in a slow file. We crossed the problematic bridge - there was no sign of the roadworkers, of course - and began to pick up speed. I needed to find the turn-off to San Blas.
Presently I came upon several successive signs indicating the right turn, but the road was unlit and I couldn't see an exit. Worried, I pulled off onto the gravel at the side of the road before I missed the turning - I didn't fancy my chances of making a U-turn on the dark highway in that traffic. Lucy's headlights picked out a couple sitting disconsolately in the dirt. On asking them for the turning to San Blas, they visibly brightened. They had been waiting for hours for the bus from Tuxpan, which was who knows how far behind me in the jam. The situation demanded that I offer them a lift.
Luis, the middle-aged man, was especially grateful and talkative. The younger woman, Angelica, was quiet. They weren't actually a couple, they were just going the same way. He was shrimp-boat captain, returning from his home in Mazatlán. His boat was in port at San Blas. I struggled to keep up with his stream of Spanish. He would be taking the boat and its six-man crew on its next shrimping mission on Monday (today was Saturday). Did he just ask me if I wanted to come along? That sounded interesting. I got him to repeat his offer, just to confirm that I'd understood correctly - I had. I asked him for how long they went to sea at a time. Two or three weeks, maybe more, he replied, but I could come for just three or four days, then they'd get a launch to bring me back. It sounded like an adventure and I was definitely interested, but I suggested that a stay of twenty-four hours would suit me better, to which he agreed and he launched into the details of life at sea.
After half-an-hour of driving along narrow, twisting roads through the dark, scrubby bush and forest, we reached our destination and I dropped my passengers off at their respective doors before seeking a hotel. In Luis's case, the "door" was on the Tropico de Cancer itself, moored at the wharfside, a seventy-foot trawler that had obviously seen better days, like all of the San Blas fleet. The fishy stench of the dock was overpowering. It was late. We said our farewells and I promised to return on Monday morning to learn how to become a shrimp fisherman ...