The negotiator

I'm a much better negotiator today than I was a few years ago.

When I was in Israel at the age of thirteen, my mom was bargaining a yarmulke salesman on Ben Yehuda Street. She wanted to get him down to about 10 shekels. He was asking for 20 shekels. I didn't understand the idea of bargaining and thought that my mom didn't have enough to buy the yarmulke and told her and the vender that I had enough shekels to cover the difference.

Twelve years later, I can say that I am much better at this whole bargaining thing. I'm not the best, but I have a better sense of what I'm doing.

This brings us to an elevated wooden shack off a mud path in Nuevo Rocafuerte, the last Ecuadorian town before the border with Peru. On one side of the table are two American backpackers who just realized that they are stuck in this town until a ride to Peru appears. On the other side of the table is a Peruvian tour guide, his driver, and his cook.  The guide had brought a pair of Mexican backpackers up The River two weeks ago and was waiting for some profitable reason to return downstream.

Begin the negotiations.

The guide and I shmoozed for a while, trying to feel each other out. I dropped a lot of Ecuadorian slang, making me seem like a man of the people. He did what he could to talk about his knowledge of The River.

He asked for a map of The River, but the guy whose house we were in didn't have a map. So he asked for a piece of notebook paper to draw an epic map of The River. He ended up drawing the stick-figure equivalent of the map of the Napo River. The River is so immense, with so many curves and intricacies. He left these out in his sketch.

He pretty much drew a line with three points on it: Nuevo Rocafuerte, Pantoja, and, a little further downstream, Santa Clotilde. He used this map to explain that he could transport us from Nuevo Rocafuerte to Santa Clotilde, where there are boats to Iquitos every day.

After about ten minutes, we stopped messing around. The guide, Pepe, said that it was time to start talking numbers.

I didn't want to be the one to set the starting value. I wanted to put the ball in his court. He took a pen and slowly wrote a dollar sign in the notebook. Then he paused for drama, I believe, and etched 750 onto the paper.

I knew that price was a few hundred dollars more than anything I would find close to acceptable. He knew this, too. I tried to do as little as possible to show this.

I took a deep breath before telling him that the number seemed a bit high.

"How high?"

"Probably about twice as much as we would we willing to pay."

"I can't cut that number in half. I won't make a profit. I can potentially offer you $400, but you have to wait until tomorrow."

"That's fine. We can wait."

"Great. We'll talk in the morning."

We saw him at his boat the next morning. He said he was waiting to see if some other passengers would arrive from Coca that afternoon, but that our $400 price would be fine. If no one came on that boat, we would leave early the next morning.

We asked him if it would be possible to leave that same day in the afternoon. He said that we could.