Falling for the French Girl 4

“I think you have a ticket with Georgette.” And he and Janine continued down the beach. I wasn’t really sure, so I asked her.
Suddenly, there were plumes of multi-coloured silica flying everywhere. The French flag vaporized. An invisible marching band played the Marseilles. I signed up with the Foreign Legion. Among the stars, the iridescent sand flashes, and the fireworks in our brains, Georgette and I lost our way to up and down. We were weightless.
Dredged with sand, we stumbled back to her Rincon posada for a shower. Just after midnight, I kissed her one last time, and returned to Diogenes.
I couldn’t sleep, although I tried. The turista kicked into overdrive and I wanted to die. Before dawn the next morning I had made a dozen forays outside my tent to dig holes along the surf line, and I wasn’t finished yet. I fainted twice in an attempt to go for water. I don’t know how long I was unconscious but, when I came to, I was too afraid to get up again. I vaguely recalled the words of Emiliano Zapata, about how it was better to die standing than to live on your knees. But Montezuma wasn’t after Emiliano, and I was just fine with dying on my knees. Georgette finally found me face down, and went off to find a real doctor. Whoever she brought back wasn’t it.
“Nada.” He said. “Nada.”
Nada. I was probably down a quarter of my circulating blood volume, hypotensive with a reflex tachycardia, in preprerenal failure with a raging white count, and definitely semiconscious. In Mexico, apparently, this was nothing. The marching band in the background accompanied him off the set.
Four Mexicans set up a barbeque next to Diogenes. I added smoke inhalation to the list. A young urchin tried to sell me black coral in my stupor. I retreated to my tent.
I did gradually improve over the next two days but, when I finally regained my faculties, I realized how much had been stolen while I was away- my towel, my hammock and rope, one pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of socks. My calculations told me that, at that rate, I'd be totally naked in a month.
The day I left Puerto Escondido, my pack was decidedly lighter, for I had also thrown away my razor, shaving gear, egg carrier, cooking oil and honey. I had heard about the Sol de Vega road, and the seven hours of hairpin turns, over the Sierra del Sur mountain range, to Oaxaca. It was one of the most rugged terrains in Mexico, rising steeply up in front of me, along the ocean. Just the tonic I needed.
Annuldo stopped for me, in his big truck full of coconuts. He tapped the roof, on top of which he had welded a park bench. I climbed up, and we lurched forward, through the gears and the clouds, into beautiful plantations of bananas, papayas, and coconuts. Roaring around one particularily steep curve, Annuldo braked for a calf that had ran across the road. The next few seconds went by in slow motion, but I distinctly recall the tarantulas flying out of my way, as I catapulted through a dozen banana trees. The initial difficulty containing his laughter, he overcame just in time, before I had decided to kill him.
Fifth Rule of Hitchhiking: Never ride on top of the truck.

We drove all night, me lurching from side to side, stopping occasionally to deal with my unrelenting diarrhea. About four am, he stopped for the last time. I woke up freezing two hours later and, thanking him, hitched one last ride into Oaxaca, with a guy that could have easily been Marlon Brando in his last movie.