Depending upon how I looked at the situation, this was not really bad news; it was just cutting things a bit tight. But it would be roughly 24 hours before I would even find out if I could get a ticket for the train; if I failed to secure a ticket, I would have wasted a whole day that I could otherwise have used to try to get to Santa Cruz in a taxi via one of the mud tracks the British guy had mentioned. This was a true catch-22 situation: if I waited for the train and there was some sort of a problem – if it was late or didn’t run at all – then I would miss my flight. On the other hand, if I left right away in a taxi, I might pay a small fortune and still not make it to the airport in time …
Bio:
Ian Birch taught business and finance at universities in British Columbia and Ontario before retiring onto a wooded acreage in the Township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands to pursue diverse projects. This article is an excerpt from the author’s book The Last Train through the Heart of the Americas: By Rail and Road across Two Hemispheres, for which he is currently seeking an agent/publisher (ianbbirch@hotmail.com).