An Handsome Conveyance

Settling into vacation mode always takes a little longer than I expect. Before the vacation begins, I start thinking that I’m going to be in a hammock next to the water with a drink that has a little umbrella in it the moment the plane lands. It’s never like that. As you know, from our last action packed episode, we spent a lot of time walking around and riding in different kinds of vans and buses for the first several hours of our arrival here in BCS Mexico.

D is an amazing planner. She gets all our collective ducks into neat rows and as long as everyone else can keep their act together, whatever she has in mind goes off without a hitch. And this is how we like it – I like things to go well because then everybody’s happy; and D like things to go well so that she can do the thinking part ahead of time and not have to be troubled with running around frantically while trying to sort things out at the last minute in a language she can barely speak. I'm helpful with things like carrying luggage, but when it comes to trying to speak anything other than English I'm really no better than a pack mule.

One of the things she totally organized was a bus ride from the airport to Todos Santos, which would be provided courtesy of EcoBaja Tours, based here in Mexico. Their website made it easy to get set up with reserved seats on their air conditioned bus that would take us directly from over there to over here. The driver was probably super-hot and they probably served cocktails en route while their burlesque troop wowed the passengers as we meandered up the smooth-as-glass brand new highway.

That bit about the highway is true. Zero potholes. Probably because it hasn’t rained here for more than three years.

Anyway, we had the flight snafu you already know about, so we ended up having to do some of that mad scramble in a foreign language thing that we were hoping to avoid. D is fluent in Italian and can understand Portuguese pretty well, and though the Spanish they use in Spain isn’t so easy, she does really very well with the Spanish they use here in Mexico. Far as I can tell, those are all Romance Languages other than French, which is the only thing that isn't English that I can manage at all. And French, if you're wondering, is useless in Mexico.

While we were between flights and hanging out in San Francisco, D sent an email to Leonardo at Eco Baja Tours explaining what had happened and asking if we could use our prepaid reservations on our return to the airport, since we were going to be too late to catch one of their buses with the super-hot driver and go-go dancers. He didn’t reply to the email by the time we caught our next flight, so upon arrival we postponed the hammock-by-the-water thing and instead walked (quickly) to the Eco Baja office, conveniently located at the terminal that isn’t served by international flights. We spoke with a woman there who was really not interested in anything we had to say, but she did convey to us that we could visit the Eco Baja office in Todos and that the helpful people there would be happy to apply our reservation to the return trip.

When we stopped off at the local office in Todos Santos, the woman we spoke to suggested that we call their main office – the one where Leonardo answers the phone (but apparently not the email), and said that she couldn’t do anything for us without our thirty-something digit reservation number (which, alas, we couldn’t quite recall from memory). We returned to the B&B and used their phone in an attempt to reach Leonardo.

Note: Eco Baja doesn’t have voicemail, so if no one answers their phone during business hours, you also can’t leave a message asking them to please read their email. They’re probably busy updating their website or something.

The next day, we went back to Eco Baja and talked to another not very helpful young woman, who said that we should call or email their main office, as there wasn’t really anything she could do for us. D explained that we’d done each of those things more than once by now, and that the woman we’d spoken to the day before told us to come back and bring our reservation number, which we were now happy to provide. We had the number, and wrote it down for her. Then she (the woman behind the counter) explained that she was only a reseller and that although she sells tickets on behalf of Eco Baja, she isn’t employed by them. She also sells tickets for other bus companies. Sort of a ground transport scalper.

Because she doesn’t apparently work for anyone in particular, she finally gave us some advice that was probably pretty sound: D and I should return to the airport and speak directly to the official and bona-fide employees of Eco Baja tours. D managed to convey the pure lunacy of us paying for, and then taking, a two hour bus ride bus to – and then from – the airport in order that we could then secure a bus ride to the airport a few days later, so she (the woman behind the counter) called (finally!) the main office to get someone there to simply say “yes, you may issue the two irritating foreigners a pair of return tickets, thanks for your help,” but no one at the main office answered. I think they were updating their website.

That was yesterday. Today we returned (we’re not going to surrender the money we’ve already paid without ensuring, at the very least, that Eco Baja tours spends ten times the value of our prepaid tickets in labor hours) and we were told a lot of the same things over again (now there were two women behind the counter that didn’t work for the company whose logo is proudly plastered across the front of the building in letters a meter tall, and each of them had some ideas they wanted to share with us). They had the post-it with our reservation number on it that we’d left last time we’d enjoyed the company of their colleague, and it was stapled to another piece of paper that had writing on it that, based on their enthusiasm, must be really helpful stuff for us to use.

On that new piece of paper was a telephone number we could call that would connect us to the Eco Baja main office, where a guy named Leonardo worked. Right above that phone number was an email address that would allow us to send a message directly to the main office, where it would arrive on a computer screen right next to the phone that Leonardo sometimes isn’t very good about answering.

D explained to the two women that we’d already made use of this number and that email address, and she (D, I mean) was getting pretty animated and stuff, so one of them finally picked up the phone and dialed the number, and Leonardo answered.

Which totally means that he’s got caller ID and knows better than to answer when a phone number from Oregon is ringing. D spoke to him, he finally realized who she was, then said he’d see what he could do to switch our prepaid tickets over to the return trip. Half an hour later he called her and asked what email address she’d used last Saturday. She told him, and he confirmed that it was the right one. A few minutes later, he called again and asked her to confirm the email address again. She did.

I don’t know why it matters what email address she used last Saturday – all we want to do is apply the dollars to a bus ticket. I think that every individual we’ve talked to so far could have made this happen, but everyone seems to be more interested in figuring out a way that someone else will have to do it than they are in just getting it done. What no one seems to realize is that if they’d just get it done, D and I would stop bothering them so much.

D says it reminds her of Italy. This is how they roll there. And though each of us has a lot of strong opinions about how things are handled in the US, the priority given to customer service is not among our complaints.